self positioning for the ILS?
Now that's a term rarely heard nowadays - but as an exercise in practicing basic use of radio aids to find the airport it smartens the scan rate if hand flown.
While Thai bashing gets people thinking more about commonsense DME v height as a double check on profile management, you would be unpleasantly surprised at the astonished looks of dismay sometimes seen when in the simulator both CDU's are failed and the crew are asked to find their way procedurely to the airport ILS from 50 miles out, hand flying raw data and no radar vectors.
But it is just this sort of handling practice that keeps the pilot sharp rather than lazy in his old age. But then again, does he need to be sharp when the automatics are so reliable nowadays?
The counter argument of course being that that sort of combination of events would never happen in real life. Like the double engine failure at low level that Sully had with his A320 ditching in the river.
Or the Garuda double engine failure in a 63,000 thunderstorm coupled with a total electrical failure when his APU failed to start because of a long stuffed battery and of course the all flaps up ditching that was the result. Of course that could never happen, either.
But it did.