DC-ATE:
I believe you are dead right to ponder the steadily increasing gap between those pilots that are locked into the wonders of automatics and those enthusiastic airmen who remain convinced of the vital flight safety importance of manipulative skills. Someone in an earlier post said that it's fine to keep your hand in at hand flying but only when it is safe to do so.
Perhaps the writer really meant that his own flying skills were so eroded that it was too risky for him to "practice" his hand flying lest he makes a complete idiot of himself or scare the first officer who undoubtedly would have been brainwashed into thinking hand flying was a potential Mayday situation.
You will never beat current automation for sheer accuracy. But in my experience in airline flying there are plenty of opportunities to keep up your hand flying raw data skills so necessary for the time you will really need them. Commonsense should dictate when the time is not appropriate to do this. If you get time, read the accident report on the Adam Air (indonesia) Boeing 737 that crashed after breaking apart during an attempted recovery in IMC from a steep rolling dive.
In a nutshell, the crew were apparently so engrossed in trouble-shooting an faulty IRS that they failed to notice the autopilot had disconnected as a consequence of their trouble shooting. Worse still, the crew failed to notice or failed to act when the 737 slowly banked into a spiral dive. With a modicum of basic piloting skills the captain could have easily righted the aircraft well before the situation got deadly serious. According to the accident report neither pilot had received simulator training on unusual attitude recovery technique.
In a similar accident in the Middle East, the crew became disorientated during a night departure in a 737 resulting in the aircraft crashing into the sea from a rolling diving extreme attitude. It seems from the transcript from the final moments of the CVR the captain was continually screaming for the automatic pilot to be re-connected. That tells you something about the insidious nature of blind reliance on automatics regardless of the impending situation.
As a long since retired (age 60 rule had me by the balls, sad to say) military and airline pilot, and now a simulator instructor, I see the steady erosion of flying skills due to the full on concentration for automatics competency. The headlong haste to plug in the automatic pilot as soon as the aircraft is airborne is patently obvious. But is it so necessary right then? Some argue it is safer in order to give time for the captain to "manage." That is a personal viewpoint that I have a problem with.
I have seen pilots in the simulator conducting practice circuits and landings for training purposes. The majority use the full automatics to fly a simple circuit. In my view that is a waste of simulator time. I have seen the same pilots design a MAP series of waypoints that would make Picasso proud of the design - and all for a bloody visual circuit. Then they lock themselves on to the flight director and never look outside and become flying robots as they fiddle with various modes downwind, base and final, then with a deep breath and the sign of the cross, they click off the automatic pilot and roller coast their way down through the remaining few hundred feet of glide slope.
Sad, really.
'Nuff said.