You're too young to remember that on longer flights there were a radio telegraphist and a navigator. And on long flights a couple of extra pilots.
And just an anecdote about a flight engineer:
On a BOAC VC-10 flight from Hong Kong or Manila to Tokyo in the middle of the night the FE was managing the fuel in the tanks. At a certain time he had all four engines feeding from the small wing centre section tank which they sucked dry causing an sudden silence. The way to get power to restart the engines was to extend, by gravity, an emergency wind turbine. That turbine couldn't be retracted so it continued running until it failed before the aircraft reached Tokyo.
Actually Delft my old Air Force Pappy was an enlisted radio operator on the C-119 in the early 50s, they flew all over the US and to the UK, and all over Europe... having two years of college, he applied for, and was accepted into the Cadet Program, and flight school.
He flew the T-6, C-45, B-25, and the A-26, at some point he flew the C-119, and the poor little ugly C-123, an airplane that he loathed, but survived. As the Lockheed C-130 was rolled out, and put into production, he became a C-130 Command Pilot.
He had flown the C-119 all over Europe on a sixth month TDY to Germany, he navigated with an ADF, and spent almost the entire six months on instruments, IFR, nearly every day. He told me a couple of years before he died, that if you could fly six months of solid IFR, with only an ADF for navigation, and not kill yourself or others, he was confidant that he was ready to go!
My Dad LOVED the C-130A, with its three bladed props, and hydraulically boosted elevator, rudder, and ailerons the 130 could be flown with abandon, in fact the Four Horsemen were an Air Force Flight demo team that traveled on week-ends demonstrating the "tight formation" style of flight in the C-130, that the Blues and Thunderbirds flew in Fighter Aircraft.
In fact if given a choice of watching any flight Demo Team, I would pick the Horsemen, very few aircraft have the presence and power of the C-130. As the A models began to proliferate, the USAF had requested an upgrade, and the B model with additional fuel, power, better radar, and restyled radome, and those beautiful four bladed props was rolled out and slated to replace the Horsemen's little hotrod As, after his first transition flight, Lead came back to the group and stated, "its over fellows, they took away our hotrod, and gave us a truck instead???"
So back in the good old days, everyone had a navigator, radio man, and flight engineer, and those gents knew and understood their equipment, my Dad came home all the time bragging on his F/E, cranking the gear down by hand, and chaining it in place when it refused to "LOCK", so no green light, but the gear was safely chained down and locked!
