Originally Posted by
Smilin_Ed
It really makes ME feel uncomfortable that the pilot of an airliner in which I am a passenger would feel "uncomfortable" flying manually.
That’s probably a result of not understanding “comfort” and workload management in the cockpit. For most of us, the sporadic and infrequent flying we are doing
is causing greater mental workload when manually flying, which used to be second nature. Corrections might require a conscious action, whereas before we made minor corrections unconsciously. Couple to that more workload in creating our situational awareness and dealing with external interactions, and the extra capacity we have is reduced. How much that affects every individual will be slightly different.
I interpret krismiller’s comments as a sensible approach to managing workload
for the current situation. Manualflying skills have been assessed in the simulator and if required they are there, but this isn’t purely a discussion around manual flying - there’s a lot more that goes into giving us the mental space and extra capacity to be resilient. In an emergency, those skills can be relied upon, but workload will be very high. We’re taught to reduce workload to an acceptable level whenever we can, and higher automation usage at the moment might be an appropriate strategy.
That, to me, is the crux of krismiller’s decision - reducing workload during normal operations not emergency or abnormal states - and increasing workload by adding more manual flying when the overall cockpit workload allows. I don’t believe that equates to being incapable of flying the aircraft manually if required - things are never as black and white as individual’s opinions on an Internet forum make them seem.
A final thought - I’m not going to question the confidence of a guy who publicly states his personal approach to the challenges we’re facing on a forum of his peers, only applaud them.