Originally Posted by Alexander de Meerkat
Like so many discussions on here, they polarise into the two camps of the lovers of brain power and mental agility and the lovers of all things green and magenta. I am an Airbus pilot and I make it my business to find out every little nuance of how the FMGC works and what little tricks are out there to make the system do all the different things I could want at different stages of flight. That seems to me just common sense and professionalism, and I have no time whatsoever for the whining ex-Boeing pilots who are completely lost over stuff they should have picked up long ago and who just say the Airbus is rubbish. This tiny handful of negative aviators usually make a great play of 'airmanship' to cover up their professional inadequacies. It is totally unacceptable to me for a pilot to be on any aircraft for a reasonable period of time and just to be sat there having no idea what advanced functions exist and making no effort to find out.
That's a pretty broad brush you're painting with there. For myself, I know my FMS pretty well, and I could certainly whip up a traffic pattern in short order for any runway in the database. I hope that the day never comes when I need a magenta line to tell me how to fly a visual pattern on a nice sunny day.
You are way off base in assuming that not needing a magenta line is necessarily the same as not knowing how to use one.