To everyone banging on about how disgraceful it is that pilots these days can't fly visual approaches:
Please tell me how I am supposed to achieve and maintain proficiency. I typically fly 90 hours a month and am lucky to do two take offs and landings. This is because I share sectors with the FO and am regularly rostered as relief crew where we don't do the landing. Often the landing will be off an RNP1 arrival or vectors to an ILS. The traffic situation is usually heavy and the flight time can be up to 15hrs. The airport is often unfamiliar with foreign ATC and maybe QFE metric altimetry procedures. Haze commonly reduces visibility in the Middle East, India and Asia to around a mile or less. Multiple runways and parallel taxiways create the risk of identifying the wrong runway.
We do not faff around trying to do visual approaches in those conditions with 300 people paying for the highest level of safety down the back.
So I only do about two or three a year in the actual aircraft, usually only in the USA, perhaps one or two to 13L in JFK (more of a visual segment) and one to fit into the traffic situation in SFO.
I have thousands of visual approaches under my belt from my domestic flying days but these days my skills are only adequate at best. So please try to understand why most long haul operations recommend an instrument approach. It is an extra level of safety for the benefit of passengers, not because the pilots are lazy or stupid.
PS - for the laymen out there; usually the final part of an approach is flown manually by visual reference. Autolands are not that common because the ground antennae is only 'protected' when visibility is low.