Flying versus monitoring
Salute!
A very good question, Chris, and it gets to the heart of the matter WRT AF447.
Your observation hits home with this old military pilot who never flew a heavy. And I am sure that 'bird, Retired, Smilin', Wolf and others can chime in here.
Make no mistake, I used the AP a lot when not engaged in a serious mission requirement like air combat or dive bombing or flying formation or in-flight refueling or low level navigation at 200 feet or lower or.... I preached the value of even some crude AP's we had, like the one in the Viper. My other AP's in the Voodoo and SLUF were really good, especially the Voodoo. We could "couple" Otto to the ILS and simply observe and adjust the throttle until field visible. The F-106 could couple Otto to ground radar datalink and actually steer the interceptor to a position that enabled radar lock-on of the "enema" bomber.
The biggest use of Otto was in bad weather and having to plan an approach or calculate fuel required to an alternate or to simply get your act together. Then we had the long haul missions like flying across the ocean while sitting in a small chair with no snack bar or flight attendants, heh heh. Of course, we would have to snuggle up when weather was crappy, and then we had to get within 20 or 30 feet of a big guy to sip some gas.
Our good-natured jibes at the heavy pilots was that we had less hours but more landings. So in 4,000 hours I had maybe 3,000 landings. We also had 95% manual flying, often at the edge of the aero envelope.
So I feel we need to seriously look at the training regimen of the airline pilots. Get them into something capable of stalling and spinning and buffeting and....
Back in the 70's, USAF assigned T-37 trainers to the buff wings so the pilots could actually practice stalls and do some aerobatics. Was a well-accepted program, and was dirt cheap.
later,