The Children of Magenta / Rage against the Machine
Maybe there is a new concept in flying these FBWs.
You can have much fun on the FCU. You can steer it across the sky or indeed across the approach being vectored by ATC.
You Selected so you are in control, not, it.
Go back to Managed and what you see will be happening soon, just as what you are seeing is happening.
You can sit and watch, observe, as PM and PF and, you get to make the selections.
When Selected its in your hands - why go manual if there are no problems? - think like the platform.
Enjoy the laziness, but you will be working harder than when you are manually flying, at least mentally, because you have to stay so much ahead of events - lest one of the events is unfavourable. You will not have the instantaneous response of direct link with the flying controls, obviously, so you just have to think in a pre-emptive way - you would only want to think like this.
It truly is an x-box AND a real aeroplane, with real pax and engines.
Its just automation and modern technology - but these same problems and queries we face - are the same problems and discussions in other industries where automation is making man/womankind feel as if s/he has just turned up for coffee!
We would not shout across the street if we are talking to the person on our mobile cell phones.
We would not want to keep our loved ones waiting for two weeks while we crossed the Atlantic in a big boat.
Or make a phone call instead of a text, or employ a further ten people, instead of being called by a person on a keyboard, which goes to the server, is fed to an antenna and transmitted to a satt which bounces it back to Earth into a receiver, along the wires, back into the air again and eventually bleeping on your phone it is time to go to work.
The same machine that has ordered all the fuel, planned the flight plan, counted the pax, picked the aircraft, scheduled the crew on leave, and called you for this flight.
We built this to make life easier, and it has. It could never replace human pilots except in an act of extreme folly and even larger insurance bills and fewer passengers plus an eventual shutdown of the aviation industry.
Why is that?
Well, what individual would be insane enough to fly at 35.000 feet with no-one at the controls?