Capn Bloggs,
Nobody is suggesting that handflying in the old days produced better safety outcomes. What is being said is that accidents are now occurring regularly in which the basic flying skills of the crew are a factor. There is only one way to keep up your basic flying skills - practice handflying. Good IF cross-reference is the key and in my experience the only way that skill can be maintained is by handflying.
"accidents are now occurring regularly in which the basic flying skills of the crew are a factor" To me that appears to be an exaggeration. We have had several accidents recently where basic flying skills/awareness have been a factor, but "regularly" is a leap too far. Additionally I'm sure I could point to any number of other periods in the last 20-40 years where a similar number of accidents of a similar sort occured during a similar time frame, and that would be against a background of significantly fewer total aircraft cycles.
What may be occurring is that the diminshment of accidents caused by other factors leaves the ones caused by this factor more readily apparent to us, and that's a good thing, but this does not justify the degree of hue and cry about the failings of the modern pilot that some like to put forward, nor does it suggest that radical changes in the approach we have to the use of automation are necessary or beneficial.
I agree with you that continuous hand flying practice is the best way to keep basic stick and rudder skills at their highest. Where I would disagree with some is on whether changing our approach to the use of automation to enable more hand flying practice during line operations would actually produce a net positive for the overall safety of flight operations. As you may recall when sims were less capable we used to practice things like double engine failures in the real aircraft. Looking back, history shows us that we lost more jet transports practicing that skill than we did to actual double engine failures. While there's a scale difference between normal operation hand flying and abnormal operation double engine failures the point is that practicing a skill with the intention of improving handling ability doesn't always come for free, and before advocating more hand flying on the line we should give better consideration as to what other risk factors we might be letting into the operation. If the trade-off is not a net gain, then we'd be doing the wrong thing.
Along this line it's worth considering that modern aircraft have a good number of capabilities and crew tasks that older generation aircraft did not have, and in many cases fewer crew to accomplish/monitor those tasks than in the past. The entire "system", not just the pilot or the aircraft, are adapting to make use of these capabilities with attendant changes in what is required of the pilot. One of the basic purposes of automation is to free up more of the physical and mental capacity of the pilots to concentrate better on those tasks and how they relate to the big picture with less conscious effort being required for the manual task of keeping the aircraft on the straight and level. This is how these aircraft are designed to be used and this is why I suggest that some folks like aterpster are perhaps not giving due credit to today's pilots for understanding how their machine is meant to be operated and using its systems accordingly. Overall they do the job with a very high degree of safety, and while it is right to focus on anything that's a perceived weak link in the safety chain and look for means of improvement, doing so without acknowledging the greater context is disingenuous.
So by all means let's talk of how we can improve handling skills, but let's do it without hyperbole and with a clear eye on the fact that if we aren't improving the overall safety of the system in the process what we may end up with is pilots who hand fly better but who end up having accidents more frequently.
Cheers,
ELAC