All these professions require a mix of procedural and declarative skill. Pilots and surgeons aren't professional athletes, they rely on enormous amounts of declarative knowledge.

The easiest time to catch a mistake is when it's made, which is as true of surgery or flight as of software development.

That's why I rely on type systems, tests and whenever I can, someone next to me asking "why?".

Read again: Coding is NOT a real time performance activity, thus can not be compared with aviation and surgery in that way. Pairing is a requirement to do aviation and surgery reliably and accurately, but is completely optional for coding well, and arguably reduces quality of code in many cases.