Agreed! If the information in this article is even slightly interesting to you, then you owe it to yourself to spend some time with Digital Combat Simulator.

Agreed! If the information in this article is even slightly interesting to you, then you owe it to yourself to spend some time with Digital Combat Simulator. In there you can get first-hand experience with the Harrier and the F/A 18 discussed in the article. You will spend a lot of time with the cockpits and start to develop your own affinity for things in the cockpit, and develop your own ideas about what you like and what you don't. Do a Google Images search for "DCS FA18 cockpit" or "DCS Harrier cockpit" and you'll see that the real life photos are pretty much indistinguishable from the screenshots, if you take the word "DCS" out of the search term. Every switch and gauge are faithfully simulated, and you can use the real-life operating manuals to operate these simulators. There's a lot of overlap with a lot of the things I love about computer systems. It's fun to learn, and to operate systems, and to feel that feeling of mastery as you gain confidence in making the machines do your bidding. Those types of feelings are much the same (and different) between operating computers and operating aircraft systems. To a large extent these modern planes feels a lot like operating a big flying computer, at least in the simulators. This is also true of things like the Cessna G1000 glass cockpit in Flight Sim 2020.