Nice one MR8.
I'm just at the beginning of my career, so I sometimes like to compare myself with the cadets. I finished my ratings with about 270hrs, mainly C152, C172, a bit of twin time.
After the 40+ hours of sim-time during the type rating I felt I can "fly" the plane, but only the next few hundred hours taught me how it really "behaves".
We can - and sometimes have to - fly VOR, NDB, visual approaches, ...
We always fly ILS when appropriate (busy airports, bad weather, ...). But if the weather is good and traffic permits, I don't believe it's unsafe to fly visually or disconnect the autopilot and FD, fly a practise VOR approach...
I've got about 500 hours on type now on as many legs and must confess, only now I slowly start feeling comfortable with most the stuff the weather throws at me (appart from very strong crosswinds, my max was 20kts and dodging thunderstorms - had the good luck of missing most of them so far due to mainly morning flights).
Not everyone in a major airline joins with thousands of hours - some are low time, who might still need some "practise" sessions, who not only need to "maintain" their skills, but to actually aquire them...
Oblaaspop said: "line ops is not considered the time to practice handling skills". I do agree. But I also believe that an airline shouldn't just rule it out totally. Did they actually leave a leeway - some exceptions? Something like: Cadets during their supervision should perform a certain amound of A/P off approaches? or: on flights with training captains, weather and traffic permitting certain things are still allowed?
I must say - I do enjoy the type of flying I do. Having the plane fly down an ILS in nice weather so you have more time to enjoy the view is great, but nothing beats a nice visual approach with 30km+ visibility and blue sky - for example in Venice where the line ups for the ILS are usually something like: fly direkt Laren (hdg 200) - cleared ILS 04R.
