ATPL’s should comment rather than people like me, but I would have thought any manual practice in line flying is almost useless if just taking over from AP when in level cruise. I have noted several older pilots talking about taking every opportunity, SOPs etc. permitting, to do descents, climbs, and other things that are more active, to keep current; and deploring the modern tendency to keep hands off and let AP do it all.
In my line of (office) work, some of us used to query whether somebody claiming years of experience really only had about 1 year, repeated multiple times. I wonder about flying hours the same way (as somebody else here hinted at) – thousands of hours might be mostly thousands of times doing the same sort of hour, letting AP do it all, with actual decision making and manipulating controls being – what? A few hundred?
I would be interested in informed answers to that.
Chris N.