About handflying and bias !
What I still -after 20 years ! -find amusing is all the argument about flying a Boeing like a Cessna 152.
That was probably true up to the DC-4 era and then became the greatest macho joke in pilot circles : Thinking that one has a direct action on the flight controls is, in my very humble opinion, either myopic or intellectually dishonest.
The last semi-modern cable-and-rods airplane I flew last was the Nord 262 and- along with the DC-4 - the controls seemed set in concrete anywhere above 170 kt indicated.
So the hydraulic power was put in airplanes, in its different forms so, to be perfectly honest, one could not move these controls on virile muscles alone...
Then came the jet and its inherent higher speed and then they gave us mach trims (transparent), yaw dampers (also very transparent), CWS (called here A/P-transparent flying) which is the normal way of operating a DC-10...And I am not even talking about changes in flight control configuration with speed (low / high speed ailerons, spoilers....) that the pilot does not manage.
So... are you still having a direct control of your flight ?
Don't you think that the engineers have given you systems that make believe that nothing had changed and your beloved DC-3 is still alive ?
And why is it that the only acceptable way of flying an aeroplane is still the 1910 way (that's as close to a century that one can get !)* ?
Does having to "manually" trim the airplane give you an orgasmic trip ?
You can say what you want about the 'Bus flight controls and I would even agree with you that some people still object to the un-linked side-sticks, but the fact is that on any FBW Airbus, one can achieve a piloting precision you've only dreamed about (it still thrills me to watch a 600 hour F/O flying a "manual" VNAV approach to Nice and the airplane feels like on steel rails ).
Quote : "Several accidental go- arounds below 100' when the PF moves the Thrust levers out of the "detent" to give it a burst of power to stop the speed decay or sink rate, he mistakingly puts it back into the detent and then gets TOGA."
That's just impossible. To go into TOGA, you need to be in the TOGA detent, equivalent to "firewalling" the thottles...
Quote : "The Ecam on the Bus is a nightmare: 1/ Ecam actions 2/ check the paper QRH 3/ check the FCOMs.
"
Wrong : the procedure is 1/Check QRH and the Tech document for possible amendments, 2/ ECAM actions...Checking the FCOM is to allow you, if you have the time, to make a decision on whether your destination can repair the fault or if you'd have some new limitations introduced by the failure (in my airline, you do that regardless of the type you're flying ; might help Operations...)...The QRH items you refer to are exactly 6 and every pilot I know is aware of them. The only important ones are about using the QRH for an Avionics Smoke and... for NAV: ADR (IR) FAULT : "in case of a total loss of an ADIRU (ADR + IR) first use the NAV : ADR 1(2)(3) FAULT then the NAV : IR 1(2)(3) FAULT checklist". I'm sure even a Boeing pilot can cope with that.
* to illustrate this point, here in France, lateral control is still called "gauchissement" which means "wing warping" !