Had coffee and chat with a friend now flying the 747-400 with China Airlines (Taipei). The QAR policy has many pilots up for a "friendly" chat with management over perceived transgressions - however minor - picked up on the QAR. The result has been captains insist the autopilot is locked in to the ILS for every landing until 100 ft below DH, and then clicked off. In other words it is a last second manual landing where in theory they (management) will have a hard time pinning the captain for an unstable approach pinged by the QAR.
In simulator training (type rating or cyclic), most is conducted on automatics. Even with engine failure after V1 with the aircraft nicely under control, the teaching is to get the autopilot engaged as soon as practicable. While not decrying the safety factor of automatic flight, there is a need to give crews the practice and thus the skills required to quickly dis-engage the automatics and FD displays for the time it might be appropriate on line to do just that.
The Boeing 737 FCTM discusses this point by saying "Automatic systems give excellent results in the vast majority of situations...when the automatic systems do not perform as expected, the pilot should reduce the level of automation until proper control of path and performance is achived....early intervention prevents unsatisfactory airplane performance or a degraded flight path....reducing the automation as far as manual flight may be necessary to ensure proper control of the airplane is maintained...the pilot should attempt to restore higher levels of automation only after aircraft control is assured.
It is on record that errors involving misuse of the automatics, followed in turn by the inability of the pilots to revert to manual handling skills in order to recover a safe flight path, continue to be caused by pilot incompetence. Rarely do pilots receive adequate training in simulators for these eventualities. How many times do we see conclusions in accident reports that specific simulator training may have prevented a particular accident? It is my experience that safety managers rarely take the time to read accident reports of other operators to see what could be learned from them and then implement simulator training to that end.