Flight Detent, Engineer and Gang: Can a civil/mechanical engineer, who loses electrical power on his computer, or when something crashed, do his calculations using other "raw data" such as a slide rule, if a formula is provided?
There is an article in a very recent "Flight International" about a British Airways A-319 which lost all flight displays, at night from what I recall.
If pilots, whether quite inexperienced or with many years of flying don't at least try some hand flying (not just when climbing to 15,000'), possibly manually tuning in VOR frequencies
while enroute, using 'heading select' to steer the ship, even try the 'VOR HSI' mode
when joining an ILS approach in IMC (no visible horizon), then how will he/she be able to fly when it is a total surprise? What if your are dispatched in an Airbus (probably not possible in MEL) or Boeing with no autothrottles? Would you refuse the aircraft?