Programming is Hard

things that takes days to learn: landing a plane. Really? I expect its harder to land a plane than programming.

I doubt it's harder, but you certainly have much better reasons not to mess up :P. A bug in your code is far less likely to cause bodily harm than a botched landing.

Why it is hard isn't that complicated, if you have ever watched someone struggle. Learning to write software is easy. Learning to debug the software you write is hard, and takes some time. Learning to write maintainable software is much harder still.

The problem of course is that the only way you will get the software to work is if you can debug it. This requires learning a new way of thinking which is why it is hard. That takes months often. Then you can go from writing very trivial programs that work to somewhat less trivial programs that work.

The problem beyond this though is that as hard as debugging is, learning to write maintainable code is even harder. It requires learning to think about the way you will be thinking (later) about the way you will be debugging the software. This can only come slowly from experience.

Visual Flying (and landing) a plane is really not that hard. There's quite a bunch of rules and protocols that you have to follow and learn before you can take the yoke, but they're safety rules so that you're not a danger to other flying objects, and well, because when you're airborne you can't simply stop if there's a problem. Driving a car around and flying a plane around are really in the same ballpark in terms of difficulty.

As an aside, people have a fear of landing when actually it's taking off that's more perilous: pull too early and you're just slowing yourself, and pull too late and there's the end of the track, with trees and whatnot. What's more, if anything goes wrong, you will be going down at a moment you're not supposed to (on the track past the point of no return, and after the end, when you don't have enough altitude to recover and by definition no place to land anymore). Compare with landing, where by definition you have room to land (even if it's a tough one) and you have both speed and altitude, since you're in the process of flying, then controlling your descent. It's then just a matter of lining along the track's vertical plane, then approaching the horizontal one not too fast.