We still have many brilliant engineers. The problem is that the brilliant ones from that age have all retired or died, and the brilliant ones these days didn't go into aerospace engineering, they went into other fields. Even when I was in college 25 years ago, we were making fun of the Aerospace Engineering majors as being in a dead-end field where they could look forward to few jobs and lay-offs. It's only gotten worse since then, I'm sure.

The pay and career potential and job security is much better in computer science and engineering, so that's where all the brilliant engineers have been going for quite some time now.