Senegoid:
But flying the old way is more fun, n’est-ce pas? I had a flight from Concord (S.F.Bay Area) to Auburn (a bit beyond Sacramento) last week aboard a Beechcraft Sierra (photo ), which I discussed in some earlier posts. I was just a back-seat ballast passenger. The plane is largely modern automated electronic computer-controlled stuff. Pretty much all the pilot did was twiddle knobs and buttons on all those computer consoles and the auto-pilot, and talk to ATC. We flew IFR, and the auto-pilot even flies all the IFR procedure patterns. I asked the pilot afterward how much of the flight he actually hand-flew, and he said about 20%. (This was the same flight I mentioned earlier, the one where the engine quit after landing as we were taxiing off the runway.)
Even on the infrequent occasions when I get to try my hand at flying real airplanes with real engines and real throttles and real propellers, I’m in it more for just the recreational flying, and only tangentially for actually traveling anywhere (other than to $100 hamburger joints). Where’s the fun in flying a plane like that?
Different planes for different missions. If I’m going to travel somewhere and go IFR a Cirrus is a great plane - lots of information and automation. But if I’m doing a $100 burger, an old Piper Colt or a taildragger fits that bill. If I had the money, I’d have a traveling plane and fun plane, probably something for aerobatics.