Some airlines - for reasons that they themselves find valid and justified - are taking it one step further.
We're now supposed to teach the cadets to use the FMC "option" over the MCP "option" every time. I.e. if you're on a SID with various altitude restrictions and are instructed to climb to a higher FL - then, God forbid, you mustn't just dial in the new FL and hit LVLCHG! No-no, what you have to do is look down on the CDU, check what level-restrictions are in there, and then delete them with ALT INTV, one at a time.
And it goes on - if you don't use the fix page to draw a TOD-ring and a 10 NM-ring from your arrival runway threshold, it's considered "sub-optimal use of the FMC". We're already prohibited from doing timed approaches at some airports etc. etc.
This means that we go one step further into the automatisation jungle - we're now moving away from flying the aircraft on automatics and towards managed automatics - i.e. removing the pilot one further step from actual control of the aircraft.
Tell me I'm wrong, but I know that the day will come when the FOs will look straight into the FMC when the aircraft does not do what they want it to - and they'll try to program themselves out of it. Gone are the days when a controller could just throw a last-minute holding at the pilots, since we'll now apparently need our 1 min. to program the hold
, or instruct us to intercept a QDR, since that will have to be put in the fix page first.
We're talking loss of situational awareness - which will do nothing but compound the problem of over-reliance in automatics. Soon we won't even know when we're being led down the gaden path
