I am not qualified to comment on Airbus philosophy or SOP so the following comments need to be taken in context.
In general, flight directors are amazingly accurate provided the information sent to them is correct. But you don’t need an FD for all stages of flight. Given wrong information and followed blindly, it becomes a fatal attraction. Yet we have seen in the simulator a marked reluctance for pilots to switch it off even when it no longer gives useful information.
Instructors are quick to blame the hapless student for not following the FD needles. This only serves to reinforce addiction to the FD needles as they must be right because the instructor keeps on telling them so. For type rating training on new pilots, repeated circuits and landings sharpen handling skills. Yet it is not uncommon for instructors to teach students to enter waypoints around the circuit and then exhort the pilots “Fly the flight director” instead of having them look outside at the runway to judge how things are going.
The FPV is a magical device when manually flying. But if you are used to flying by it all the time, then try flying with it off for a change and see how much your scan has deteriorated.
First officers are a captive audience to a captain’s whims. If the captain is nervous about letting his first officer turn off the flight director for simple climbs or descents, or even a non-threatening instrument approach, then it reflects adversely on the captain’s own confidence that he could handle a non-flight director approach himself, which he probably can't. . The FAA has already acted belatedly in publicly recommending that operators should encourage more hand flying raw data if conditions are appropriate. But switch off the flight directors if you want real value for money, particularly with low-hour pilots. It may save lives on the proverbial dark and stormy night and the generators play up.
Decades ago the so called "Silent Cockpit" policy was introduced to cut down on unnecessary and often distracting chatter between the two pilots during operations below 10,000 ft. But nature abhors a vacuum and now we have situations where the golden silence below 10,000 feet is filled with company mandated SOP calls as mode changes occur. The fact that most pilots have good eye sight and can see mode changes on annunciator systems is now seen as not enough. You have to tell the other pilot what you are seeing. Perhaps the next future design feature in cockpits is to have automatic loud speaker announcements at each mode change to reduce the workload associated with verbal call-outs by pilots..
Last edited by Tee Emm; 16th August 2020 at 03:36.