-b- writes:

The very voice of experience!

Mostly research rather than experience.

If you're so keenly interested in aviation, take some flight
lessons, for God's sake.

That isn't practical at the moment.

Today you sit around in a French café with your pals telling them you
would be perfectly able to land an airliner and that you know more about
aviation than most pilots.

I don't go to cafés, and I don't have pals.

If you take some lessons, by the time you solo in the lowly
Champ or C152 (and you will get there) you will have, if nothing
else, dispelled the notion that you would be capable of landing
an airliner!

Since these are not airliners, flying in them would tell me nothing about my
ability or inability to land an airliner.