I flew a thing...

Almost melted off enough to head back up here

…is being able to (at least somewhat) accurately determine the direction and altitude of the plane from your fixed location on the ground. Making sure the plane is lined-up to land must be a bit of a trick.

If I were driving a race car around a track while standing on a podium in the middle, I'm pretty sure I'd crash into anything and everything.

One of my dad's engineering friends had a whole stable of scale model planes that he built himself and he'd take them out to fly every now and then with my dad and me. I was always too young to take control, though, which I found to be frustrating. Maybe it's easier than I'm picturing it, though.

You can have the experience you describe in the middle 'graph by using an RC car.

I find it hard enough to deal with the abstraction in 2 dimensions with a car. I'll have to wait for the RC planes that support video goggles.

Flying from a fixed point of view is definitely challenging at times (mostly when the airplane is coming at you, and right=left and left=right), but with practice and repetition it's like anything else; you develop a nature for it. When I'm flying, I imagine the pilot point of view, and control based on that. That way, no matter the orientation of the plane, you always have track of left/right/up/down. Not to say I never get mixed up, but that's the idea. ;)