Originally Posted by
bobwi
However, the airbus has lots of failures that imply the loss of the automation. Manual flying skills will be there, but rusty and will consume a lot of capacity which will be taken away from decision making.
I don't think that's something unique to Airbus (Airbii?). In terms of autoflight (something entirely separate from FBW), most modern Western airliners tend to be flown using the automatics from noise abatement to final approach. This is true whether you're occupying the seat in a Boeing/MD/Embraer/Avro or an Airbus.
I have it on good authority that when one switches autoflight off on the FBW Airbus models, they tend to hand-fly rather well.