Thanks All for your replies.
If we might just have a look at:
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The risks IMHO are 1) people who never fly them! 2) Not watching airspeed. 3) Not watching bank angle 4)Misjudging rate of descent on base/final and turn to final 5)Misjudging vertical profile overall. 6) Flying in bad viz/Wx in general 7) Flying in heavy traffic 8) Flying with tricky terrain.
The main benefit is surely going to be reduced time/fuel burn.
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Each of these are clear risk factors and are identified in the FSF ALAR (Flight Safety Foundation Approach and Landing Accident Reduction) project. Each of these risk factors is easily mitigated by flying a Terminal Approach Radar monitored autocoupled ILS or at worst a VNAV straight-in approach.
The benefit of reduced time/fuel needs to be assayed against the increase risk of an unstabilised approach and resultant Go Around. There are also question about designing SOPs for a Visual Approach .. what are the standard calls, what are the trigger points for gear/flap, how do we tell when the guy flying it needs some support etc?
What I am getting at is that as professional aviators charged with a lot of responsibility we are expected to provide maximum affordable safety at all times and I, personally, am not convinced of the cost benefit of visual approaches, particularly non-runway-aligned when there is a proven safer alternative available for the sake of a few SOPs, briefing and setup of the cockpit for an Instrument Approach.
The argument of maintaining the ability to hand fly a no FD A/T visual approach for the vanishingly small chance of a total EFIS failure seems, to me, false economy.
My company forbids turning the FD off under normal operations unless rearming it when visual on a non precision approach.
I won't start in about the new crop of very low time chaps we have coming into the RHS these days as I expect every jet pilot to meet the standard and that should include the ability to hand fly a raw data visual approach - but that is what the sim is for.
It is good to see chaps involved in a frank exchange of views on an interesting topic.
All The Best,
Brad