Aerocapture (or aerobraking) has been a staple of science fiction and for-real planetary flights for ages now. Over the past few hours, I've come to realize that there's a real skill to it. The precision for atmospheric entry is extremely tight. a few hundredths of a degree too deep and you end up being fully captured and must land, a few hundredths of a degree too shallow and your ship remains hyperbolic. 

In our TL8 world, much of the flying of most aircraft is in the hands of an autopilot for much of the time, and though pilotage is far from becoming a lost art, it's certainly not the skill it was in the old days. I imagine ships and crew in Traveller are something like this; computers have handled everything for so long that perhaps even the astrogator is only vaguely aware of the concepts of orbits and gravitation and the rest of the crew view the universe in much the same way that star wars fans view the universe: a bunch of blue-white spheres hanging in the sky improbably close to one another, with space wizards battling each other with some kind of fantastic energy weapons out there somewhere. 

Now and then, though, there's got to be that pilot that relishes the uncontrolled space of a distant frontier system, a vast universe of huge distances dominated by gravity. No traffic control, no civilization, no urgent timeline to get the ship landed, unloaded, serviced, reloaded and launched again and time for some fun: computing the vectors by hand, touching up the trajectory just right, and performing an unpowered aerocapture around the target world, perhaps wistfully thinking of the naked blonde girl he met years ago on another frontier world, somewhat ashamed that stories of that encounter have been turned into prurient recruiting material that the imperial scout service peddles to imperial teenagers: 

(with animation: https://i.imgur.com/mckIJsl.gifv ) 

for the curious: initial hyperbolic excess velocity was 16168 m/s, eccentricity was 5.21. After skimming the atmosphere (down to about 60 km altitude) eccentricity was reduced to 0.641 with a semimajor axis of 1.406 diameters. The second encounter results in landing.