Thanks for that Pew - hadn't heard of that one although my father told many tales of many others. He'd spend weeks on T1's and T2's at Shannon and Prestwick doing base training at a time when fuel was cheap and I presume simulators poor. He certainly got rather tired of being required to use autoland as often as possible to build up the reference database. He claimed that the passengers didn't like it as it was prone to give a rather more agricultural arrival than the manual version. I presume today it'd all be done on the simulator.