To say little of getting the training necessary to fly an airliner. It may not be the hardest thing in the world, but it's hardly easy.

Its very easy if you're not pushing the performance envelope or trying to financially optimize. Its very hard to avoid crashing, although if your intent is to crash, no biggie.

I never soloed but got close and I've got friends with their ATP ticket working for minors and I assure you that 99% of flight training is "this is how not to get killed".

If they trained to do an instruments approach to the towers during a thunderstorm with a partial panel and an engine out, I'd be impressed. What they actually did, from a piloting perspective, eh. What minimal training they did, eh.

So if the pilot is out of the cockpit and its just you, and engine #2 experiences fuel starvation, and the lights are out (who cares why) the exact switches you need to flip to cross feed fuel and the exact gauges you need to look at with your flashlight to determine if its an engine problem or a fuel problem are ... and the exact procedures you follow depending on which it is are ... and you need to answer this instantly or fail your flight check. Or you're on an IFR approach in thunderstorms with one engine out and the primary VOR out now what do you do it doesn't handle the same and you're "uncomfortable" with alternate instruments. Also they test the pilots to destruction basically with distractions, in a simulator you lose cabin pressure and cabin lighting and engine 1 and the controls are feeling weird and there's a fire warning light and hydraulic caution so now what. Fire warning on APU #1 now what? OK now electric bus B just tripped off.

Its much more a damage control job than like being a perfect precise ballerina. Although if your flight maneuvers aren't as smooth as reasonably possible they're going to be pissed after you land, unless your a hijacker so you don't care...

Flying an airplane straight & level in good weather that's already up in the air is fairly easy - and from what I've read about it, they still did a poor job of that. Airliners are designed to be easy to fly, with minimal input. I.e. they are stable, and if you just take your hands off the controls they'll fly straight & level.

What's hard are takeoffs, landings (especially landings), flying in bad weather, emergency conditions, etc.

There are many cases of people with no flight training whatsoever being able to successfully take off and fly, but are unable to land.

"There are many cases of people with no flight training whatsoever being able to successfully take off and fly, but are unable to land."

I would agree with that and this strikes me as the kind of thing that isn't resolved by anecdotes but via someones first five minutes with a PC flight simulator. Anything beyond arcade level.

Some of the more outlandish claims I've read about flying pretty obviously come from people who's shadow has never darkened a keyboard of a PC running MS FS or X-Plane, or even talked to someone who has flown a plane or even played a PC flight sim. I did a ton of PC sim work to wrap my brain around navigation concepts (like the to/from VOR flag, and how approaches "feel" at speed while under cognitive load) and PC flight sims help a lot with nav, but latency combined with lack of feedback and weird controls made it not so useful to replace actual flight time.

As for straight and level that depends on having been properly trimmed, but its really not all that much harder than driving. I don't think an aircraft can be FAA certified if its not stable in at least some axes. I know several exotic research x-planes were not stable in some axes at some parts of the flight envelope and some .mil planes were (are?) not. If a plane is stable, hands off it'll more or less smoothly point to some velocity vector and nose direction (first noob pilot discovery is those two need not be pointed the same way, and almost never are... planes are in an eternal skid, sorta, unlike a car). That 3-d velocity vector might not be where you want, not at all, but it'll smoothly stabilize there unless you adjust the trim tabs.

Um, your ground vector won't match your nose direction if there's a crosswind, but I can't quite make that fit into "planes are in an eternal skid, sorta, unlike a car". Any stable aircraft in a genuine skid will quickly weathercock until the nose is pointing forwards again, and if you hold it in a skid with the rudder it'll eventually raise a wing to bank in the direction the nose is pointing (and if you hold that wing down with aileron you'll gradually change course as your engine(s) pull(s) you around until you've flown in a large and stomach-churning flat circle).

Incidentally, do they teach that you should crab into a crosswind for your entire final approach nowadays?

Bad word choice on my part as I was thinking of "skid" like a car as in aircraft spend about zero time at zero angle of attack on the airfoil, not skid as in poor rudder use during turns.

I donno about crabbing all the way into the ground now a days but if you're crabbing when you hit the ground I suspect thats very hard on non-castering gear and/or its ground loop time.

Well, the hardest thing is landing, followed by taking off. Although I guess certain in-flight emergencies would really be the hardest - mainly during landing or take off. The hardest thing they had to do was fly them straight and low enough to hit the buildings.

Most airplanes will take off pretty much by themselves if you just point them down the runway and open the throttles.

Sure, if you don't have a crosswind. They'll take off, just they won't necessarily stay in the air.

Airplanes are designed to be stable if you let go of the controls.

Relative to the air it's flying through, yes. Relative to the ground? Not so much. And that's what matters most when transitioning from or to being a ground vehicle (takeoff/landing).