Originally Posted by
Dropp the Pilot
"Manual flying" at many airlines (including the airline in the spotlight) means disconnecting the AP but leaving the FD and ATHR connected.
This is not only of zero value in maintaining, developing, or recovering any piloting skills, in many cases it exposes your passengers to risks.
Flying any SID out of any European airport in this fashion results in one of the two people in the flight deck being lost from the monitoring role, and the second of two being lost as soon as ATC gives a "direct to xxxxx" clearance and his head wobbles down to the CDU. A non-monitored flight deck at 2000 feet is not a good look.
I do recall my brave cockpit companion proudly announcing to me during taxi in LHR that he had decided to hand-fly the Dover departure.. I had to tell ground control to "say again" the taxi clearance as it took a few seconds for me stop laughing at the idea.
Only Dover departure charts I could find are from 2013 (guess it's been a while), but I see nothing on there that would make me apprehensive about the PF not using automation. Flew in the EU for almost a decade, now in the US for almost two. Almost every pilot I am paired with will hand-fly (mostly FD/AT ON due to RNAV) till 10K every leg, I will go FD/AT OFF probably once a week, both for departure and arrival. No, not on the Whitestone or Coney climb out of LGA, unless it is with someone I have flown a lot with, and not after I come in on a red eye, but pretty much anything else is fair game. There is not a single major carrier in the US that mandates automation on, and plenty that mandate that with the AP off the AT should come off for their 737s. The value you could get from hand flying with FD ON is learning to look through the flight director. It is often easy to see a trend starting and anticipating a change a of pitch, and to see the delayed reaction when the FD catches up. Yes FD off would still be better, but not always practical/legal. I strongly disagree with the notion that it is safer to just sit and monitor, because humans have time and time been proven to be terrible at that, and I also definitely believe in just having the muscle memorie from repeated control inputs will make it much easier if at some point you do need to do it yourself, for instance for a TCAS RA. I have had the AT deferred, and seen pilots struggle being able to set power, because of lack of practice.
On that subject, I fly out of KLAS where several departures have crossing restrictions at or below 8000', for traffic on the STAR on a 9000' downwind. I am on the A320 and when light it will climb at over 2000 fpm during the capture. Had several RAs due to this. The only way I have been able to prevent this is by AT OFF and reducing climb thrust (If you select V/S you lose the constraint in the altitude window as our SOP has us setting the highest altitude).
Obviously, aviation is safer due to automation compared to the 70-ties, but I believe we have gotten to the point where there there are more (potential) crashes due to blind adherence to SOP and lack of airmanship/basic flying skills because of our reliance on automation. To hear a fellow pilot scoff at the idea of hand flying what looks like a pretty basic SID does not sit well for me.