Pilots make flying an airplane look easy, almost automatic. So what are all those hundreds of buttons and controls in the cockpit for?
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In older aircraft, there are switches to control the electrical systems, hydraulic systems, engines, radios, etc. A lot of those switches allow you to isolate broken systems, turning off various parts of that system.
When learning to fly, you spend hundreds of hours in simulators learning exactly what each of those switches do, and learn hundreds of pages from the manual that details how the airplane works. It’s a complicated system, but once you’ve learned one airplane, a lot of the knowledge transfers to the next. The exception being that most of the newer and more modern aircraft use glass displays (think computer monitors) to display all the information and they have levels of selectable menus to “activate” those switches. Only those that are critical to functioning during a power or computer loss are still physical switches.
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