Originally Posted by
sheppey
The finest book on flying Jet transports you will ever read IMHO. The chapter on his advice to airline pilots is a must read in which he exhorts pilots to keep up with practicing manual raw data flying ILS in crosswinds and not to become lazy in their professional lives. . He makes the point that you should not need a flight director and autopilot to complete a flight. He warns of the danger of complacency and blind reliance on the automatics. And that was years before the spate of loss of control in-flight accidents where automation dependency and lack of basic instrument flying skills was the primary cause of most of these type of accidents, and still is. With many operators nowadays banning manual flying with threats of punishment if the QAR reveals a transgression, opportunities have become far less for a pilot to follow Davies's sage advice. More's the pity..
My time with TWA was 1964-1990. The entire time, the company ops specs required us to use LOC instead of ILS minimums if both the flight director and autopilot (autoflight on 767) were inop.