A few years ago when I was a First Officer, I was completing a visual approach to a North of England airfield.
There was other traffic in the circuit ahead of us and we were instructed to join a 4 mile final (1300 QNH). We were a little high so I disconnected the A/P, and asked for gear down whilst still at Flap 1. I also asked for the landing checklist to flaps, in order to get the checklist out the way, therefore enabling the two of us to have 'heads up', during the manually flown visual positioning to land i.e. good airmanship.
The reply from the Captain was that the landing checks only come with Flap 15, therefore we should not break SOP and we should delay doing them until this point.
The company had recently had a big drive to 'hit home' how important it was not to deviate from SOP's. In principle I have no problem with this, but the way that some people have interpreted this is worrying. Common Sense and Airmanship seem to have been sacrificed for fear of a sentence written in a manual.
An SOP can still fly you into the side of a mountain if you don't apply common sense. Sop's cannot be written for every conceivable situation, and it seems that the rigidity and lack of flexibilty within some operators is restricting a pilot's ability to 'think outside of the box'.
In my six years of flying I am lucky enough to have only had two major situations aboard my aircraft. Both were multiple failures that could not be covered satisfactorily by the QRH or the company SOP's. 'Seat of the pants' flying and unconventional thinking were required. Unfortunately I fear that in future we may have lost the ability to move outside the envelope to find a course of action that will get one out a hole.
Rant over...