Originally Posted by Centaurus
As there is no way you can have an audit trail for manual flying during line flying then it opens the way for wide spread cheating. That is a common thing in fake logging of instrument flight time on line - no audit trail. As far as simulator logging of hand flying is concerned that means the sim instructor must keep the log which gets messy. And don't forget it is a good bet that many sim instructors are themselves addicted to automation.
I'm not sure that is valid. With a little bit of software, most modern aircraft could keep track of whether or not the aircraft is being flown manually and by which side. Should be an easy job to uplink that data along with aircraft maintenance data for analysis at the end of each flight / series of flights (if out of communication at an intermediate destination.)
If it is important, it can be done.