That much is obvious. In a 2500 word article that you otherwise liked, one seventeen-word sentence was enough to send you off on a rant accusing me of setting back our profession 20 years. You're unusually sensitive on this subject. Me, I've spent eight years writing blog posts about exactly what airline pilots do, about how we're far more than underworked button-pushing monkeys, about the dangers of relying on automation to replace experience, about how many industry managers have come to take safety for granted and how it's resulted in real tragedies like Colgan 3407. When I encounter ignorance on these points among the general public - which is actually pretty rare - I'm happy to engage them and explain exactly what we do. It's not a big deal. Many times I'll mention the same things that I mentioned in the article but you failed to quote - the expressway visual to LGA, for example, or "snowstorms and thunderstorms and reroutes and diversions," or "airplanes [that] break in surprising and disheartening ways," or how I've had "mechanics pressure me to accept aircraft with deferrals of dubious legality."

Now, all that said. I do regret my choice of words in that one sentence. Not because of anything you or ShyGuy have said, but because some real-life friends who I respect have called me out on it. A far better wording would have been "The autopilot and autothrottles are unusually smooth and precise, relieving the pilots' workload in busy moments and freeing them to perform the most important function in any cockpit, the one task that no avionics package yet devised can do for them: think."

Hindsight is 20/20. I personally don't feel that the wording that was published sank the entire article. You feel differently. C'est la vie.