Tee Emm
>>Agree. The problem is that surprisingly few pilots are competent to do this because in all their FMS lives, full use of all available automation has been drilled into them and they lack both the self confidence and the situational awareness to keep their hand in during sunny weather<<
Actually it is the other way around for us. Most of us are rather experienced in the non-upgraded airplane (and its steam-gauge suite) and therefore a bit skeptical about the reliability of all this glass-cockpit magic. The fact that we had some pretty bad cases of failures doesn't help either. I personally had a case a month ago that I lost both GPSs and both INUs in flight. The blended solution (Kalman-filter aided INU) held on for a while but eventually died as well. Left me with an extreme case of map shift and DR as the best available navigational solution. Not pretty. Fortunatelly this was in rather nice wx and in familiar airspace.
Regards,
Spiros