With the exception of Destiny, X, and 00, there's at least some validity lended to the reason the kid ends up in the cockpit. (Alternatively, the character is in his twenties, a la Shiro) He saw his father's machine and tried to use it to protect his friends, or an officer on the team for the unit pushes him into the cockpit to try and safeguard it, and the kid, and he unwittingly wrote the motion algorithm for it, in his college class. I mean, anything better than "This kid was conscripted and trained by our terrorist organization to blow **** up in a prototype war machine that's worth more than your life".