Learning computers is much easier than learning the other necessary things to be successful in a prop aircraft.
Am I saying these pilots are not skilled? No - most of them are very talented individuals who have a passion for aviation, but with all the computers doing most of the workload for someone its easier to put a much less skilled pilot in it and have good results.
I disagree. Some of the basic stick and rudder stuff is easier, but the workload and physical demands are higher. We routinely wash out people who would probably have been fine WWII pilots, not because we don't need them or because someone else would be better, but because we are concerned that they have some lack of ability that would result in their early and pointless death, the death of a wingman, or (best case) result in the waste of millions of dollars trying to train someone who simply can't do the job.
I'll say that the F-15E is the "easiest" plane I've ever flown, IF you consider "flying" to be nothing more than takeoff, landing, and autopilot cruise. Using it effectively in combat is extremely demanding, and if we ever needed thousands of F-15E pilots I suspect we'd be dumbing down a lot of things because even with the thousands of highly motivated volunteers we get every year, we still wash people out throughout the entire pilot training pipeline, including some people who get to their fighter squadron and never really make much of themselves there, or worse, die from relatively basic mistakes that they've been trained to avoid from day one.
No, the computers don't "do most of the workload" in any modern aircraft. All they do is let the pilot work on other things. He's still engaged 100% in extremely difficult tasks, and the washout rate even when producing only a mere fraction of the pilots produced in WWII speaks volumes about how difficult it still is.
Plus... A modern fighter pilot is an athlete... Has to be, to be able to survive multiple tours in aircraft that can pull 9 Gs. The relatively wild lifestyle lived by many WWII pilots, however necessary at the time to cope with combat stress, would simply not be survivable nowadays unless the aircraft capabilities were grossly underutilized. You simply don't smoke and drink yourself to sleep night after night, then go up and fly 10 hr missions in a 9G aircraft. The best traits of old school bomber and fighter pilots, bombadiers, and navigators, must all be present in a modern fighter pilot because he's doing all of it. Yea the computers make it work since a fighter pilot can't whip out a slide rule during a SAM defensive maneuver when he's at the IP point and needs to recompute his weapons release parameters, but he's still doing 10 things at once while pulling 6 to 9 Gs, and failing in any of those tasks means he's not making it home from the mission.
It isn't easier... It's actually more complicated BECAUSE of the computers.
Heck, you might as well say that nasa astronauts have it easy because the computers do everything for them... Ludicrous. The computers simply make an impossible task possible, or make a difficult task possible to complete with a more effective result.
