| I voted natural ability but of course all of the above are important.
I particularly remember an article somewhere about the role of spatial awareness as being decisive in air combat.
What that implies is that the skills of a great fighter pilot are the same as the skills of a great footballer (which is why I would have been crap). A footballer, or a fighter pilot, not only needs superb eye/mind/body co-ordination, but also needs to be able to track several events happening around him at once, i.e. not only the presence of other players/aircraft but whether they are friend or foe and the level of threat they present. He has to make complex decisions based on all these factors in fractions of a second; to plan aggression and self-preservation simultaneously, and his aggression has to be controlled and directed.
Whereas the Bomber pilot had to get on with his very complex job when all he could do about the dangers he faced was to hope that nothing would happen - being even more vulnerable to random events than the fighter pilot. Different skills but just as demanding. Very occasionally in my own job I find that with all the Risk Assessment and planning you can do, sometimes you just have to hope everything will be alright - magnify this a thousand times for bomber crew. |