Airmanship and experience.
PP and Phantom,
Well said! Let's hope you are preaching to the converted and others will learn from this incident to avoid making similar mistakes in the future.
NPAs flown as CDAP are supposed to be safer than the old "dive and drive" method. Either way the pilots should be staying ahead of the aircraft to make the approach and landing a routine event. I guess the question is how do we teach "airmanship" to the new pilots who have never flown "steam gauges" and rely mostly on the glass technology for their situation awareness?
As for the topic of using AP for most of the flying. IMHO, it should be a matter of airmanship/common sense again. If the SID/STAR involve many altitude constraints and ATC is very busy, of course the AP should be used even in VFR conditions. Personally I like to hand fly the departure and arrival as often as I can to maintain the "handling skills" but in a busy environment it would take the PM away from his/her duty of monitoring when lots of MCP manipulation is required.
Let's hope I never resemble the debrief I once heard a military instructor said about another student: "he was so far behind the aircraft that had he crashed he wouldn't be hurt..."
Happy Landings!