Ok, here goes.
Some of the people that don't have good hand flying skills don't know that they don't have the skills until they are faced with a situation where they needed them. That might be blindingly obvious, but it's happened, and smoking holes, or a missing aircraft are too often the result.
It can't be stalled? Oh? I don't have the exact memory of the specific details, but it is very possible to fly the bus into the ground, if the wrong inputs to the sidestick are made, and maintained, as it tries and fails to do what it's being told to, and I'm not talking about AF here.. The specific issue is that it won't stall wings level, but there are scenarios where the decision tree in the automation seems to be in the wrong order of priority, so it goes wrong, very quickly.
I cringed when I read how long it took a heavy and experienced crew to work the check lists on the A380 that had the serious uncontained engine failure. The length of time it took to get through all the issues was scary.
Standard Operating Procedures are exactly that, STANDARD. If something NON standard happens, then there will be occasions when the procedures may make the situation worse rather than better, but to make the call on that requires a level of knowledge of the aircraft and it's systems, and the skills to then use that knowledge to acheive a result that is acceptable given the circumstances. The 748 at Stansted a while back that had the engine fire and landed ahead rather than fly the circuit is an example.
A long time ago, a specific exercise in a large aircraft sim was to fly an exercise that was designed to make the use of almost any procedures impossible. Start from a runway threshold, ready to roll. As the brakes are released, start the stopwatch. Climb at pilot's discretion, in any way that the airframe can handle, to 10,000 Ft. Land back on any runway, full stop, shortest time wins.
To make it easier a good sim, with good visuals, and of course, CAVOK, and no wind.
It was interesting, in the wrong way, when this was tried with a group of type rated first officers. 2 of the 3 broke the aircraft in the air, as they didn't have the underlying raw flying skills to acheive the exercise. The time record was set by a non type rated pilot, in a 747, the time was 6 Mins 25 seconds. A bit of fun, not really too important? Maybe, maybe not. If you have a choice of doing something very non standard, and getting it on the ground and stopped in (say) 10 minutes, or flying a full and "proper" approach and procedure that takes maybe 18 minutes, so what? If there's a major fire that cannot be contained or controlled, 8 minutes is possibly literally a lifetime, maybe for all on board, but to do a quick and dirty dive to a runway mainly visually, requires skills that we now are seeing are possibly no longer there.
Do we blame the pilots, or maybe look more closely.
Was some of the problem the decision by the beancounters that low time first officers would be good (cheaper!) simulator instructors? A human factors researcher that I worked with a long time ago said something along the lines that an instructor cannot pass on more than 80% of his skills and experience. Keep changing the instructors on a regular basis, and the skill level is diluted significantly, espcially if the instructors train the new instructors.
I did my CPL/IR in California, and after the first flight of what was meant to be a month with the instructor, went to the owner and had a long discussion with him about the rest of the course. Turned out the instructor that was meant to be taking me to ME CPL/IR had 10 Hours on type, a Seneca II. I'd frightened the instructor rigid by doing things that were so outside of his experience and skills that it became obvious to me that there was no way it could work with him. Maybe 350 Hrs of ME time, and a lot more unapproved sim time before I did the CPL course had a lot to do with it, but it's another aspect of the dilution of skills. A different instructor with a lot more time and it was problem solved.
Are some of the issues that some of the simulators don't fully model the extremes of the envelope, and that applies to some of the Level D sims used by the major airlines. If the sim can't do it, it can't be trained, or even experimented with. Again, from bus exerience, one manufacturer's sim didn't correctly model things so that a trimmed aircraft that was disturbed in pitch only and then allowed to do whatever it would, didn't recover, and eventually departed, and I won't even discuss what happened when we tried manual reversion! We had to go and use another sim from a different manufacturer to get the information we needed for the project we were doing, and in the process, did something without being aware of it that the trained pilots had been told wasn't possible.
The end result is that yes, you can take just about anyone, train them in the right way, and when everything is going even reasonably OK, no one will be worried. If something does go wrong, with either the aircraft, or the external scenario, then it can change, very rapidly, and possibly badly so. The only way this scenario will change for the better is for each pilot to look very objectively at their experience, and skills, and decide if they are happy with the way that they, and their employer are allowing them to operate, and if they are not happy, something has to change.How that will happen may not be easy, as it's not something that will happen without pain to the entire system. At least it's out in the open a bit more now than it has been for a while, and rightly so.
Steve