Wingnut writes:

Experience driving versus never having sat behind a wheel should make
some difference. It's plain old common sense!

It makes a difference, but not necessarily a useful difference.

There will be some commonalities.

Very little in common, and much of it too dangerous to use. For example, the
747 has flight controls, and so does the Cessna--but a Cessna pilot who
actually attempts to fly the 747 by hand will obtain even worse results than
he would if he simply stayed with the automation.

I don't claim you'd be proficient; just that you wouldn't actually
be *less* capable than someone who knew *nothing*.

You would not be less capable, but you would not necessarily be more capable
in any practical sense.

First of all, we weren't talking "pilots of small private aircraft", at
least not until you came along and introduced that particular strawman.

Virtually every pilot arguing about it here is a low-time private pilot. I can
spot them from a mile away. They're in the "danger zone" of low-time pilots,
where most accidents occur. Enough experience to feel confident, but not
enough experience to feel humble.

Second, they may not be able to do a good job, but the total non-pilot
will surely do a worse job.

The results might be the same. The results for the pilot might actually be
worse if his experience encourages him to take risks that the non-pilot would
not (such as attempting to fly the aircraft by hand).

Except in your earlier, specific scenario of being talked through a
procedure from the ground, where anyone with basic comprehension skills
will probably do about as well.

The only viable scenario is one in which the pilot/non-pilot is given
instructions by a qualified third party. It is unlikely that a non-pilot or a
pilot without experience in type would know enough to land entirely on his
own, without instructions.

Someone with piloting experience might
more quickly be able to find and recognize particular controls or
instrument readouts though, and will be able to understand a more compact
jargon, so he may be a bit faster though other than that only as good as
the quality of the ground instructions.

He might find the magnetic compass faster, and he'd recognize the yoke and
rudder pedals and throttles. Beyond that, nothing is really certain. The real
risk is that he might think he knows more than he does, which means he might
do risky things that the non-pilot would not.

Someone who says that "the less experience a person has at a skilled
task, the poorer their odds of completing it successfully" is
"uninformed"? In what universe? In the one where I live there is this
thing called a "learning curve". It climbs steeply at first, then bends
over, but it's monotonic increasing, and it indicates task performance as
a function of experience. Performance improves with experience, slowing
down and eventually plateauing. For some things (e.g. Tic-Tac-Toe) it
plateaus fast and low; for others (e.g. chess) it plateaus much more
slowly and higher, because the thing being learned is more complicated.
But it does not actually dip down at any point.

The accident rate for non-pilots is zero, because they do not fly. The
accident rate for pilots with thousands of hours of experience is very low,
becaue they've been flying for a very long time. The accident rate for pilots
with only a limited number of hours is very high, because they gain confidence
before they gain competence. A low-time private Cessna pilot is thus in a
dangerous zone (and most pilots of small Cessnas are also low-time pilots),
and he has experience that is irrelevant in many ways to that required to fly
a 747. He is thus at considerable risk.