Originally Posted by Roger Greendeck
A wise instructor once explained to me that modern cockpits turned the high workload phases of flight into even higher ones and the low workload phases into lower ones. Neither situation is ideal.
I personally think the "wise instructor" is not so wise after all.
This is a classic case of a blanket statement which has a "sounds good, feels good" ring to it, but isn't really true.
High workload phases of flight include things like penetrating severe weather, and letting the aeroplane do the flying while you concentrate on what the weather is doing and spinning a heading bug around accordingly, and is substantially lower workload (and risk) than pushing and pulling the be-jeezus out of the thing on the clocks while being thrown all over the sky. That's from first hand experience - numerous times over (and I don't need it beaten into my head yet again).
Also heavy ATC environments, where the barely-able-to-speak-english guy rattles off five instructions in 10 seconds, and while concentrating on turning onto the correct heading you go "and what was the altitude again?". "And what ROD did he say?" "And what speed did he say?"
How many pages of this topic do we need to go through to make it clear that there are times to hand fly, and times to plug the automatics in?