All this talk of A&P's reminds me of when I was a new hire at UPS, going through the DC-8 ground school. Our instructor was an old DC-8 flight engineer, you know, one of those life long professional engineers. He felt it his duty to impart every bit of DC-8 knowledge he had ever acquired, to us new guys, who had no desire at all to sit for 1 minute longer than required in the back seat.

Anyway, this one day he was talking about the pedestal panel, and more specifically that piece of equipment, hidden within the pedestal, that allowed one pilot to operate the flight controls, in case the other pilot's yoke became obstructed. From what I remember, he called it the "grabber". He was into his lecture of the Grabber for over an hour, when I got up, left the room, and went down to the break room to have a soda and to take a break.

The class came in maybe 5 or 10 minutes later, and the instructor came up to me and asked why I had left the room. In my best new hire form, I explained to him that none of us cared about the grabber, or more specifically, how to build it, because: 1) we were all pilots, not A & P's; and 2) since we couldn't get to the thing, it was of no use in our knowing how to take one apart and put it back together. He thought about that a little and from then on, he taught us in a more pilot friendly manner. I was quite sure that he could build a DC-8 if all the parts were just lying around.