Well, as much as we grunt and groan about how everyone needs to do it
the way we did (six miles uphill both ways in snow), it's the way of
the future.

Heck, I still think young people should train on manual drive cars, but
I'm out of date :-)

The Army trains soldiers in tank simulators. The merchant marine uses
ship bridge sims to train pilots of huge super freighters. The Navy
uses submarine sims. And so forth.

On the one hand, you could argue that with say, the Airbus computer
overrides, even a non-pilot passenger could handle the sidestick and
throttles and never stall in the air.

On the other hand, I'm always reminded of that story in one of the
pilot mags a few years back, about the fully loaded 747 taking off from
SFO. It lost an engine right away, and the young co-pilot tried to use
the yoke instead of the rudder to straighten out. This popped up a
spoiler on one side (kills lift so the plane banks) and the plane
stopped climbing. The pilot and a jump-seater nearly had a heart
attack, and yelled at the co-pilot to get off the yoke and use rudder.
They missed a mountain by mere feet. Moral of the story? I dunno

Cheers, Kev