Ah, BOAC,
You'd make a great Chief Pilot because your logic is good.
Unfortunately, they'd probably fire you for speaking such legal department heresy as not computing the landing distance like a good little line soldier (on some properties.)
I like your idea, and that's what I'm angling at: reduce meaningless cockpit chores, paperwork and standardization babble. At some places, the number of required briefings is absolutely ridiculous now. A4 has the politically correct training answer: Go into holding and start over. But I prefer briefing the circle to land and dispensing with as much distracting garbage as possible before let down. If you don't work for an airline where the Captain has authority to dispense with some of this happy horsechit down low, then you risk being turned in by your F/O for being non-standard.
BTW, when I flew the old bus, even though the MA is the same on Circle to 12, you still had to manually reset heading (by re-centering the blue heading reference AFTER rolling on to final), and THEN turning the heading bug
to the right to 240 degrees (preset), or believe it or not, that old airbus would remember a left turn to MA heading where you originally set it and turn flight directors the wrong way! Boeing knew to take the shortest path to the heading preset. Airbus did not. One more friggin distraction!
You also had to check and see that the MA was still in the FMS, IIRC. Sometimes it just didn't stay in there with the runway change. So all this automation actually loaded up the crew where everything was "azzholes and elbows" on a tight circle to land. We finally outlawed them.
I know what I'm saying sounds silly, but early glass Airbuses were very, very different from steam-gage boeings. Having flown both, I can assure you that the FCP autoflight had more bugs than a bait store. Every time a new operator went into a Bob Hoover tail slide, I was not surprised at all.
Don't get me wrong. I loved hand-flying the airplane. I just couldn't trust it's automation, it's nav display or it's flight guidance, that's all.
Now another poster says the F/O was a two-year veteran, so if that's true, please disregard my rookie F/O theory.
Crunch - out