Are you not exaggerating a little,
BPF?
In VFR conditions, everybody is looking out of the window 99% of the time.
Maybe not seeing things
you expect them to see, but that's another story.
The only way one can be looking inside the cockpit for any length of time, and not lose control, is if one is on autopilot and those are going to be pretty rare in the PPL training environment, which I assume is where you work.
I often read about people having their head in the cockpit but this never sounds very real - except in very modern hardware.
And a GPS, with its instant presentation of position and the provision of the projected course line, reduces the time spent reading instruments by a big margin
One could certainly write reams about basic airmanship, preflight activities, all kinds of stuff like that, and actually I have written reams and reams on that elsewhere as you probably know, but I wouldn't give it fancy names.
If some bloke flies a plane into a mountain, on a VFR flight which was in solid IMC for hundreds of miles, killing himself and his family in a thunderstorm, with nonworking deice boots which he couldn't care less about, presumably flying VFR to avoid Eurocontrol route charges, without evidently having even looked at tafs metars or any other kind of wx data.... would you say his "single pilot CRM" was less than exemplary?
Maxred - what you describe is not as unusual as it ought to be, but it is a very different issue from "single pilot CRM" or whatever. It is the result of being able to buy any plane and, within one's class or type rating, fly it away, with no mandatory ground school, and with most instructors having no clue either what the knobs do.
When I bought my TB20 in 2002, I never found an instructor who knew what the HSI did. I had to work it all out myself.
This is less common in the USA where insurers mandate type specific training (at this level of hardware, anyway).
There should be some pretty mandatory ground school on modern aircraft systems but we need to be careful what we wish for in this already grotesquely over-regulated activity. The CAAs are hardly in a position to do anything; they are firmly still in the "KNS80= state of the art" era.