I had 6 months of not flying between mid March and mid September last year but had recency maintained in the simulator. First flight back I was not comfortable, particularly when I disconnected the autopilot on final. Simple tasks which previously were second nature, now required a bit of thought and took longer to accomplish.
After making a normal landing on one of the shorter runways in our network, my confidence returned. On the home leg I could feel it coming back to me as skills which couldn’t be exercised in the simulator came to be used.
In the last 5 months I will have logged about 30 hours and am currently flying about twice a month. I feel more normal now but am well aware that I’m still a bit rusty. In addition to the recency sims, I’ve had two check rides and recurrent training which involved manual flying and didn’t give me any problems. For the moment I’m leaving the automatics on in the aircraft until I feel comfortable with the extra workload involved in hand flying. I don’t even bother about the schedule, we leave when I feel ready to fly.
Different people are affected in different ways after a prolonged period of not flying, keep the workload as low as possible initially and gradually build up as confidence and currency increases.