Oh, and speaking of airline myths [1], this bit from the article caught my eye:
Insult to injury, Pummer finishes up with that “for a job that technology has made almost fully automated” bit. Pilots themselves are partly to blame for propagating the mythology of cockpit automation, so enamored we tend to be of our high-tech gizmos and sophisticated planes. But again, the knowledge, training and experience required to fly one of these “fully automated” jetliners are vastly more substantial than Pummer and many others would have you believe—especially when there's a problem or emergency. That, more than anything, is what pilots are paid for—not for the routine trip during which nothing out of the ordinary happens, but for the times when something goes wrong.
“Can someone with no flight training safely land an airliner? Plus: Pilotless planes, overpaid pilots and other aviation myths. [2]”
Heh. Sounds like our servers at The Company. For the most part, they run themselves, and even the <shudder>control panels</shudder> allow one to manage the server. But when things go wrong, they go wrong and it takes a metric buttload of experience to diagnose and fix the problem in those cases (and it's certainly debatable if that's a form of progress or not).
[2] http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2007/12/21/askthepilot258/index1.ht