Why Boeing Pilots Can't Fly Airbus Jets Without Being Retrained

Are you a true, red-blooded American pilot, wondering why those damned European commies won't let you fly one of their planes? Are you Boeing born and bred, curious as to what about those fancy-pants Airbuses means you're not allowed to take the yoke and head skyward? Well, there's a simple answer: It's the controls. In fact, that Airbus doesn't even have a yoke for you to grab. 

Boeing and Airbus have very different control schemes in the cockpit, making it difficult to jump between the two. While Boeing has the traditional yoke in the image up top — that's a 747, if you're curious — Airbus uses a side-mounted single joystick that's a bit more finicky to control. Pilots looking to jump from one to the other need some real time training up on the different control mechanisms, even if they're experienced with otherwise similar aircraft — practice flying similar planes with similar size and similar numbers of engines doesn't mean as much if they're controlled in such a different way. 

Small training planes, Cessnas and the like, generally use the Boeing-style central-yoke setup. Pilots coming from that background will have a bigger learning curve than they may expect when they hop in the cockpit of something like the A330 pictured above. Folks who've flown both say it's easy for newcomers to the Airbus layout to "over control" the aircraft, pushing the stick too far in any direction looking for feedback from the plane — feedback that isn't provided on the same level as a Boeing, as the Airbus is making more small corrections by itself to keep things going smoothly. 

There are other, smaller differences between Airbus and Boeing control schemes — Boeing's automatic throttles move the levers while Airbus's don't, Airbus cockpits don't illuminate switches that pilots don't immediately need to address — but those pale in comparison to the differences associated with the side-mount single-joystick controls. If you're looking to make the switch, maybe invest in some simulator time first.