Kyle Smith opened his piece in The Wall Street Journal‘s Free Expression with a summary of a survey on non-pilots landing a passenger airplane in an emergency. Included in that was this bit about women’s assessment of men’s ability to do so:

To the average woman, the idea that the average man could land a complicated passenger aircraft on his own is ridiculous.

Not only for women, though, the problem with working seemingly complex problems is the mindset that blindly goes along with over-complexifying the challenge.

As an F-106 driver I once worked with said about flying his jet, “Pull the stick back to go up, push forward to go down, left-right just like driving a car.”

The airliner is just the same, for all the dials and gauges and switches and levers in the cockpit. Not easy-peasy, but not that difficult, either.