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Comment by Tuxer | Hacker News Reader

As you become "good" at driving in harder conditions, you'll use your butt (which is really how you're physically connected to the vehicle) to figure out the traction state of the car, to know if the car is sliding, if it's close to losing the rear end or the front end, if it's pitching down or up, and so on. This is how you know which corrections to make to the vehicle to keep it going fast without losing control.

Pilots of small planes do the same thing. After a while you can just feel small accelerations and change of directions without needing to check some of the instruments.

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Your last paragraph was what I came here to say: I fly a small Cessna 172 and when i first started to fly i was being cleared to solo and the instructor who cleared me gave feedback on my landings at the end. His main remark was "You'll start to feel it in your rear soon enough, it comes around the 150-200 hour mark, but in the meanwhile, trust the instruments and your visual indicators". Ironically you're simultaneously taught to always trust the instruments over your inner ear, and generally as much as I do get the buttock feeling now, I would say my primary focus remains on the visuals + instruments.

Huh, fascinating. I remember reading a Star Wars novel ages ago in which they said that one of the things that made Luke Skywalker a good pilot was that he slightly detuned his craft's inertial compensators (or whatever the Star Wars version is) so he could feel how the craft responded. Didn't realize that was actually based on real life driving/flying!

The common complaint against "new" vehicles and their drive-by-wire systems is that they functionally act as inertial compensators, dampening road feel.

If the roads were perfect, you wouldn't necessarily want them (day to day), because it diminishes the minute vibrations that make their way up to the pedals, into the steering wheel, etc., and those things give you feedback into what the car is doing that are invaluable.

Of course, the roads aren't perfect, and most of us aren't doing high-performance driving on them, and we don't need anywhere near that degree of feel, so the benefits of driving by wire far outweigh the cons of analog driving.

Hence the expression "to fly by the seat of one's pants".

TIL! I always assumed that was one launching onesself into an endeavor with so little forethought as to be facing the wrong way.

Though pilots have to be careful, because feelings can be deceptive especially if you can't see the horizon (clouds, night). In those conditions you must trust the instruments over what you are feeling.

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