I have only just found this thread and I have to say that I am quite amazed at the number of posters who seem to think that flying their aircraft without an autopilot is such a big deal.
As I said on another forum recently, the presence of an autopilot on the aircraft that I presently fly is not required by the MEL. Not long ago I did a 4-sector duty hand-flying and it was no big deal at all. I don't want to do it every night but it was no big deal.
I freely admit to belonging to the old school and I also spend a lot of time in the simulator so that I always tend to hand-fly for the first and last 20,000 feet when I'm flying the real thing (unless the weather is crap). It is very easy to keep current at button-pushing but much harder to keep your hand-flying up to scratch. To me that is the essential skill for a professional pilot.
We all have to be prepared for the unthinkable such as a total electrical failure. Believe me, it does happen from time to time. From my experience it is not simple engine failures or fires at V1 that kill people it is when the bizarre happenings that are not in the QRH occur and which therefore usually involve a high degree of basic aircraft handling skills that things start to go badly wrong. That is why we are called pilots and not dog-handlers and, as I have always assumed, is precisely what we are paid for.
In any event I can now understand from some of the responses on this thread why the introduction of the raw data ILS to minimums as required for the JAR LPC (FCL 1.240 (b)(1) Item 3.9.3.1) caused such a fluttering in the dovecot. As a TRI/TRE who conducts dozens of such tests every year it has been my experience that the beginners (with 250-400 hours) find this exercise quite easy and so do the old boys (once they have got over the initial shock). However there were quite a few who fell between the two stools who were obviously pushing too many buttons and whose basic flying skills had been neglected. My debriefs have obviously worked for I don't see too much of this any more.
I also spend a lot of my time teaching LOFT. I simply cannot buy the idea that by hand-flying we are over-loading the PNF. I can personally quite happily hand-fly the aircraft and deal with ATC etc while PNF deals with getting the weather and other things. If you really don't think this can be done what the hell are you going to do when you have a total electrical failure and your F/O is immersed in a very complicated QRH drill and can't monitor you anyway for the standby horizon is on the captain's panel?
Now then, I love automatics. I was disappointed in the DC-10 for it was only duplex-autoland (I came from a triplex-autoland background)! I always but always teach pilots to use the autoplilot when something goes wrong IF IT IS AT ALL POSSIBLE. That always helps us to step back a little bit from the problem and become better managers but, for God's sake, don't forget that you were hired as a PILOT and not as a dog-handler!