I assumed the parent meant something slightly different from just learning - something along the lines of: observation of instances of planes taking off and landing but without conscious consideration of the features that differ between the two sets of "training data". Not really learning per se as that would require some form of study of the planes and their differences??

I'd say the most appropriate term here is intuition (which I'd say is definitely regular ol' learning, but that's a matter of definitions and semantics).