JW411;
I am simply incredulous that any so-called professional pilot should consider that doing a visual circuit in a large aeroplane is in any way difficult.
Fully concur - it is such a basic tool in the kit for every pilot that it is indeed hard to believe.
But it has been trained out of the profession partly due to a misplaced infatuation with automation and it's capabilities. I have seen company responses where a visual gets badly messed up with the result that the operations people have clamped down on "doing visuals" rather than emphasizing fixing the issue in training. One can do visuals "by the numbers" in the sense that judging when to turn base is usually a 45" run plus some seconds added/subtracted for wind but the energy management of a heavy four-engine aircraft is the same as any machine when one understands the need for an effective scan, aircraft mass & energy and swept-wing aerodynamics and can use the wonderful amount of information at hand on both the Primary Flight Displays and Nav Displays, the absence all of which is the chief problem in disappearing skills.
Using automation well and appropriately is like hand-flying appropriately - it is a tool and there is a time, (most of the time, in my view) to use the designed systems to their full capacity. But when one is in a machine which ultimately may require manual intervention either in anger or "in fun", it had better be anticipated and competent. There are plenty of abnormal circumstances where, through various system faults, (speaking of Airbus here), a degraded autoflight system requires such skills - it's just part of the profession, even though it is reducing in importance as autoflight becomes more sophisticated.