Ralph Cramden: . . . "Where have all the pilots gone? A sad lament indeed. They have been automated out of existence. I'm afraid there are not many Sullys left in our industry. A man who took an automatic A/C and flew it."
Sorry
Maximum, you may be flying with 99.5% sharp UK copilots whose manual flying skills are never in doubt. But I am mostly dumbfounded by the many [mostly non UK] 500hrs-on-type copilots who are either afraid or not motivated to ever want to hand fly the airplane. Not even in VMC!
Irrespective of the training culture and idiosyncracies with overall emphasis on automation, . . . For the life of me, I can't figure out why these chaps have an aversion to ever wanting to get a grip on the real airplane.
Instead, they hang on the A/P and do an autoland at destination; or at best, disconnect at 500 feet and then "fly" 30 seconds in VMC to touchdown.
I would often suggest to these chaps: "After 14 boring hours, don't you want to at least disconnect the A/P and A/T for
10 minutes . . . and do a manual intercept and try hand flying the ILS?" Duh.
