I am not saying all automation is bad, quite the contrary, it is great to have, however it seems that a lot of crew simply slip 'out of the loop' accidently with the fixed mindset of letting the AP fly - especially near the ground.
What happened to hand flying to 10000ft, or at least the initial portion of the SID?
Maybe it's just me, but in a two-man flt deck there should be plenty of capacity for one the hand-fly and the other to run checklists and radios.
I am not saying people should hand-fly in crap weather conditions for the sake of it, but they should certainly be prepared to do so at any time. If both get preoccupied with checklists or the autopilot, none is monitoring the actual flying.
Think about it this way... we'd have probably read about this in the papers wouldn't it have been for the SIC on the jump.
