At the risk of receiving a lot of flak, I beg to present a slightly dissenting opinion. Despite the number of recent high profile accidents ultimately attributable to failure of automation combined with the lack of skills to counter it, overall aviation has constantly improved the safety record over the past decades, and the constant reduction of the accident rate can mostly be attributed to automation preventing fatal errors, and strict adherence to SOP's. The accident rate (per flight hours) is a tiny fraction of what it used to be in the fine old days (an older fart myself, I cherish those days but accept that they are gone forever). One only needs to go through the records of the sixties and seventies so see how many accidents happened during trainng for new types, mostly while hand flying. Simulators and automation have all but elminated these types of accidents, and most of the other common causes of the past decades.
One must face the realities that in the post-deregulation world, with accident rates so low as they are, consumers are no longer influenced by safety when chosing the carrier. Even in the dodgier parts of the world, air travel is far safer than any alternate (I did take a domestic flights in Sudan recently, knowing that the overnight bus is far riskier, one crashing into an oncoming truck every week). The commercial pressures require any operator to meet the expected safety standard in the most cost effective way, and automation was a huge boost, permitting crew with less time and experience to operate aircraft as safely (or safer) as crews decades ago with vastly superior training and capabilities. Bluntly put, is any money spent by the industry to expand initial and recurring training to maintain or improve those hand flying skills on a global level beyond what is required today (we are talking billions in training costs) going to prevent further accidents, and if so how many? Would we not be better off by spending the same money on ensuring that current standards are adhered to (regulators in many countries are under staffed and under funded), or infrastructure is improved ? One also needs to consider the possiblity of inadvertantly introducing new risk factors into a system that, based on numbers, appears to work reasonably well.