Quoted from my company Operations Manual:
Policy on the use of autopilot, autothrottle, FD
Levels of automation
The following levels of automation are defined:
- first level: no automation
- second level: use of flight director while hand flying
- third level: use of autopilot and auto throttle in its basic modes (alt. hold, lvl change, vertical speed, hdg sel., ...)
- fourth level: use of autopilot and auto throttle in flight management modes (LNAV/VNAV)
Flight crew must remain competent to use all levels of automation.
This last sentence leads to a very nice mix of flying departures and approaches in all these levels of automation and keeps us current. Depending on the weather/traffic situation most of flightcrew adapt easily to other levels of automation. Altough this is the first company that I work for, I like it this way.
No captain looks odd at me when I ask if he is OK if I fly a raw data departure or approach from 10.000ft in CAVOK weather. From some I hear that I can be surprised when I would also do this in other (especially british) companies.