Nightbird: Thanks for the response. The other comments from y'all are also interesting to read and arouse my curiosity about the 320 etc. Years ago one of our 757s had autothrottles on MEL, and a Captain offered me two extra legs to fly due to this! It was fairly easy to find power settings on approach-maybe the seat of the pants reacted to the thrust from those powerful fans (it is 75% giant turboprop).
The fly-by-wire Airbus must be a trickier plane with which to find power settings on such an MEL, compared to the Boeings with FMC etc? We hand flew the 757 often to FL 180, even to FL 240. Do most Airbus pilots, whether in the US or overseas, not enjoy hand-flying and feeling like a pilot? The other pilot can punch some of the buttons...let them help earn their paychecks. It is still not nearly the work of a DC-9 crew
, at least after IOE and several more trips.
If our guys/gals find hand-flying the bus welcome in that fleet, then the change would be something which I would look forward to. Foir now, I still prefer "steam-gauge" planes, with straight-forward systems, i.e. hydraulic, elec, fuel-even the fairly primitive pressurization and airfoil anti-ice. As with the very old US show, "The Outer Limits": "we will control the vertical, we will control the horizontal", and the throttles, with our bare hands.
"We don't need no stinkin 'thrust mode control panel!", and are steam-gauge and not ashamed.