How embarrassing...
Tee Emm, my apologies! I didn't browse through your earlier posts; I've gathered that you're ex-mil and that you reside in UK so I assumed wrongly that there was one less A in the acronym of the air force you've served with. When I read under occupation: casual hero, I've thought:"Well that wouldn't befit an ex-Jag driver, must be Lightning then." So sorry, sir.
I read NOTHING in his post the way you did.
Must be generation gap and/or my level IV English. I would only be too happy to be demonstrated that I've mistaken TM's style for substance and that actually what he wrote was a polite request for information, politeness and unassumingness of which were wasted on me.
you do what you think sensible
A policy which is the most successful when what one thinks is sensible and what is sensible overlap.
Regarding the airmanship: if I'm not mistaken, while RAAF operated Mirages, it was considered to be good airmanship to cross the threshold at about 3 ft and I'm pretty certain that ops manual of locally deployed MiG-21s from 70ies stipulates optimal TCH of 1 meter. Is it good airmainship to do so? If a)someone knowledgeable weighed the risks of undershoot vs. overrun and concluded that overruns are more dangerous and more likely to happen with increased TCH b) his calculation is vindicated and there are far less landing gears torn off by runway lip than there were bogged down behind the far end of the runway, then answer is, surprisingly: yes. Just because I strive to cross threshold at 50ft, it doesn't mean that everyone else has to do the same. Airmanship is knowing what will assure the optimum outcome of the flight and doing it.
Preserving one's night vision at expense of making one's aircraft less conspicuous is definitively a no-no. Night vision was important a couple of decades ago with feeble airport lights and scarce navaids and still is with a lot of outback operations. If I understood correctly, the original question was about transport category aeroplanes operating from intl airport and for these it has not much relevance as a) it doesn't enable one to see through cloud or fog on approach b) it gets ruined by bright approach lights on landing anyway. Concern when I turn the landing lights or strobes or beacon off is not about night vision but about reflections off the droplets that can make acquiring visual reference (i.e. app/rwy lights) difficult. However, I was taught that in cat 1 or better conditions glare is not strong enough to be impeding on visual part of approach and landing. I'm only too happy to report that, so far, my instructors seem to be right.
Are SOP's that pedantic that good airmanship is no longer a desired factor in flying airliners - but strict adherence to the book is?
Not where I fly. Anyone proclaiming good airmanship to be obsolete is in for a nasty surprise. Following the book is good airmanship 99% of the time. 1% makes the difference between pilots and sysops.