Hex - thanks for your (obvious) interest. Personally I do not think basic flying skills are in question, more are they being given the right emphasis in the training and testing on modern a/c? As I have said, I perceive the problem as being one of dimininishing emphasis on these. Even in the 90's I saw command checks being failed on 737's following a runway change to a parallel runway at about 10 miles, where the 'candidate' went head down to programme the computer for the new runway, thereby messing up the approach - probably because of the training mentality' which existed which was that the flight management system should be used at all times rather than just flying the a/c onto the new runway. It is very easy to be distracted by all the button pushing and electronic messages away from the primary task which is to fly the a/c. Concomitant with that we must ensure that there is enough information to enable this primary task.