I was answering **enipla **just above. His question was what if we put somebody like **Llama Llagophile **who has flown RJ airliners & now flies bizjets but has never flown fighters into the cockpit of an F-whatever. For something like an F-18 and earlier IMO he’ll figure it out. I truly don’t know enough about later stuff to opine with much confidence.
How to steal a fighter: Move the throttles & look for and feel for a mechanical lock or detent between off & idle. Ensure you’re in off but know how to move to idle & back. Find a switch labeled “battery” which is probably lever-locking. Turn it on and see some electrical stuff start to happen. Find the switch labeled “APU start” or “engine start” and flip it to Start or On. etc. for a couple more steps.
Eventually you’ll get the engine(s) rotating and once the cranking RPM stops increasing, put the throttle to idle. If it lights off it’ll settle down at whatever RPM it thinks is idle soon enough. I don’t know the number and I don’t care.
Figure out where the gear and flap controls are. If the flaps are even pilot controllable. Waggle the controls and make sure all the wing & tail feathers move as you expect.
Find the parking brake knob or switch, release it, find a runway, and shove the throttle up to full blast. You’re flying 20 seconds later. Take note of what speed it wants to lift off at. Plan to fly approach 10-15 knots below that.
The key thing is that at least up through that era of fighters, 99% of controlling the airplane systems is through more or less conventional switches and conventional controls. Every airplane is just a variant of the same overarching theme.
Conversely, all the weapons & radar and ECM & … stuff is totally in the computers / MFDs / HUD / magic helmet, etc. And, as I said, good friggin’ luck to anyone, even somebody like me after 30ish years, figuring any of that out any time soon. With the engine running you’ll have normal electricity so you can play with thebuttons for awhile, but there’s a couple hours worth of fiddling to begin to start to make sense of the easy parts. Why bother? At least for enipla’s question.
Somebody like *LLama *or myself could use it to go joyriding on a sunny day. And probably live to tell the tail at least once. But we couldn’t use it as a weapon, even against cooperative targets.
Would some P-51/Spitfire pilot in 1943 be able to figure even this much out and go joyriding? Almost certainly not.