Originally Posted by
Ollie Onion
Why stress about it, if the Airline wants you to use AThr at all times then why not just do it. I hate flying with those pilots who want to do everything manually on every approach. Funnily enough when I get paired with them in the sim it rarely improves their hand flying :-) I find the sim use of manual flight more than sufficient to keep my hand flying up to standard.
Depends on the day doesn’t it? On a lovely clear day with light winds and maybe some cloud and minimum thermally nonsense isn’t it fun to do some manual/raw data or visual flying? With AT on of course as that is our SOP.
Appropriate manual flying can be a lot of fun, that’s mostly why I do it and encourage others to do so. It does build confidence particularly in First Officers; on the 737 it sometimes felt as if people were afraid that they would disconnect the AP and the jet would be fighting them, rather than disconnecting and having a perfectly in trim jet that was a delight to fly. The bus is of course something else entirely.
That is purely my opinion of course, I manually fly mostly because I love flying.