Bunglerat, what exactly does hand flying the jet achieve that the autopilot can’t when left hot and high? Can your arms extract a little more speed brake deflection than George can?
A lot of the issues discussed here arise from poor training and lack of understanding how the automated systems work.
Actually Zapata, I strongly disagree.
The Airbus flight directors are 1.1G limited and in a hot n' high scenario are very limiting. Having flown Airbus domestically in Australia with Ansett we were expected to smoothly but firmly put the aircraft where we wanted it to be after taking out the automatics. When the aircraft back in the slot automatics re-instated.
Moving on to today as I respect the fact that the old TAA/AN domestic operations no longer the norm.
In today's operations of STARs & SIDS the limitations of the Airbus automatics can still arise- poor vectoring, G/S intercepts from above etc.