What exactly is it about monitoring that's so hard?
Knowing, and understanding, just what it is that the magic box is supposed to be doing, so that one knows when it is going wrong - seems like the pilots that we are discussing just "watched" it without knowing enough to correct a diverging glide slope? If you don't understand what the magic box is doing, better to throw the whole thing away and just fly the beast.
Auto-land automation in aviation came along to help pilots land in low visibility, to reduce the number of weather related diversions, I doubt it was originally intended to take over the whole task ?
Bu having said that, I believe Eddie Rickenbacker refused to put auto-pilots in Eastern aircraft, saying something like - these guys are paid to fly, let them fly - until ..... it was proved to him that steady flight control and throttle inputs in the cruise ......... wait for it .... saved him money !!
When you're long gone my generation will be saying the same as you and then it'll be my turn. Then the next guys. Keeps going, progress I guess...
circa 1957. A Nav.instructor once told me that I'd never make a navigator so long as I had a hole in my a**** until I'd been over Berlin with the shells coming through the cockpit as I tried to work out a 3 -wind drift calculation looking through the drift sight. I never had to.
Later, as a Nav. instructor myself, I felt similarly about my own pupils trying to cope with the sextant in a bit of turbulence, but then along came INS ( and now GPS )and they never had to.
A friend lent me an iPhone the other day, couldn't even work out how to make a simple call - but then I rarely have to, little is so immediately important that it can't wait until I get home to my - large button - desktop landline.
But ... if the present, and future, generation of pilots are forced to use this offshoot of Bill Gates' warped imagination, the very least they can do is learn how to use it - properly.
Is that too much to expect ?
I now get new, young, students, admittedly only flying LSA's, who can't even correct an ETA mentally, and have to pull out an iPad, and if I ever cover up the flight instruments and ask them to maintain height and heading visually ........... don't start me.
World's Gone Mad.
QED.