Originally Posted by
double_barrel
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.
That’s because most of the time the automation does something stupid, we just turn it off and fix it with some stick and rudder skills. The reports you read are the crews who didn’t do that. The A320 AP is pretty nice, but I’ve seen it do some stupid things.