Originally Posted by
172_driver
Addmitedly some 737s, which ironically will be held against me now
Because you said so yourself, I'll have a go :-)
Yes, because there is a design issue, and the "way out" called the "rollercoaster" is nothing but a very military archaic maneuver which is now banned from the books in the interest of safety of people in the back. The situation would be similar to a Cessna where the instructor would just trim down in cruise and tell the student to keep the pitch up and the student is not allowed to touch the trim. Do we practice that? Is that a check requirement? No it is not on a SEP. So this situation does not hold it's place to defend manual trimming skills. Because you simply CAN'T manually trim a 737 in high speed.
But to me the essence is still the same. Many people will defend the "practice", so will I. However the reason for the practice is completely different. It is a skill you need to keep up because you can be dispatched with A/T inop. However, when it comes to defining good and bad pilots, it is highly overrated. For that to happen, too many times I've been in the sim wondering why my PF decided to handfly because he can and he has less confidence in the AP compared to his own skill. People that experience a "threat" will resort to a situation in which they feel the most comfortable. This results in many times people swearing on raw-data skills prefer to hand-fly a lot longer when the AP is actually a lot easier. Which leads to a lot of other issues (PM workload ie). It's a false sense of own capabilities compared to the evolution in automation. And that is an equally big threat on the flightdeck. Ego is a bitch.