Centaurus,
Its not hard to get 10% of your total time as instrument time if your flying a turboprop single pilot, you are more likely to be in mid to low level cloud more often. You are less likely to get instrument time when flying above the tropopause, and less likely flying multi-crew, as only the pilot flying or controlling the autopilot can log I/F.
These crews go to "strips" at time in the most awful conditions, a lot of them are not served by approaches.
Flying a circuit into a strip/road where there is no runway lights (which does happen) at night in a remote area free from most ground lighting does take above average hand flying of the aircraft, its a IFR circuit, no autopilot. Only people who do similar are some tactical MIL flights, however I understand they use NVGs for doing this.
Most sections that I know of have MELs which allow the aircraft still to be flown single pilot with autopilot U/S for a number of days.
As far as I know it is not common to fly any non-ils approach in these aircraft with autopilot on.
As you would remember, renewals used to be done every 6 months, 8 is not unreasonable.
Flight ops manager sounds like a warm and fuzzy way of saying chief pilot.
I would rather go with a RFDS pilot any day when going anywhere remote, and a 744 skipper when going somewhere needing a CAT 3 approach, each part of the industry has its niche, obviously both pilots would have proved themselves over and over in demanding conditions.
