I love these threads.
Flying and landing an airliner does take some level of skill - but I don't doubt at all that a hard core FSX pilot could land an airliner on the runway - especially the guys with the full 737 mock up cockpits in their basement. The touchdown may be a little firm but I think he would be able to do it safely.
I'm an FO on the ERJ-145 btw. However I did have a chance to fly the 737-200 level D sim at Delta when I was 14, and had no problem flying and landing it. Little did I know that 12 years later I'd be flying the exact same sim during my airline interview, lol. My experience up to that point was a few hundred hours in my dads Super Cub and who knows how much time flying Flight Sim 95/98 or 2000. Maybe the Cub time helped me more than I thought, who knows. It really is not that hard to fly an airliner, especially if you have some sim experience.
Maybe I'm just crazy. But the general public thinks you have to be some kind of superhuman to land an airliner. Sure there's a ton of switches and dials in the cockpit, but when you turn the autopilot off, it's all stick and rudder and looking outside, you have an airspeed tape, an altitude tape and a heading tape as well as a flap and gear handle. That's about all you need to pay attention to in order to land it. You're not flipping a bunch of switches and doing some wild balancing act while you're coming into land.
Also, if the airplane is equipped with autoland, it is capable and does routinely land the airplane without the intervention of the pilots aside from them coupling the autopilot to the localizer and glideslope with the push of a button. It will fly it all the way into the flare and touchdown.
