What if you never had the ability in the first place-ala cadets?
There are former cadets out there who are far less reliant on the automatics than many on PPRUNE give them credit for. Whilst I despair for the current generation of cadets coming through, there are in fact cadets from previous generations who went through the same training regimes as their non cadet peers and had to demonstrate their ability to do more than follow the magenta line. I agree that things have changed in the last decade though and I despair as to what may be in the next decade but I don't like the term 'cadet' being attached to the myth that they don't know how to fly a visual approach sans automatics.