Originally Posted by
Vokes55
A pilot’s reluctance to fly raw data is usually due to company policy, not because they don’t have the confidence or ability to do it. In some parts of the world, a simple mistake made whilst going against company policy and flying raw data would see them out of a job (and a residency visa). With FDM there’s no hiding or covering anything up any more.
To play devil's advocate as an outsider to this world......Isn't that telling us that (most/all?) companies have decided that they would rather have pilots who use the automation effectively than pilots who know how to hand fly? When you feel that you want to build-up your experience doing something or other because it increases your confidence, adaptability, and ultimately safety, but you are prevented from doing that by company rules with draconian consequences, something has to be wrong. I suspect that the company policy is based on hard statistics showing that pilots make more errors than aircraft systems, and that fully understanding and using aircraft systems is the core of the job. When I look at accident reports, the proximate cause is almost always a crew who configured their systems wrongly for what they were trying to do, often with the systems working perfectly, sometimes with confusion resulting from a simple single hardware failure that was poorly handled. The catastrophic failures rescued by brilliant stick and rudder skills are vanishingly rare.