J.O:
Yet again, the sages refuse to acknowledge that if the accident rate the industry "enjoyed" during their hayday were to exist today, we'd be cleaning up a smoking hole every three days. Improved technologies, strong SOPs and better training are largely the reason why that rate has been slashed so significantly. Are things today perfect? Not hardly, there is still much to do. But rolling back to the clock to the days of proving our manhood and making it up as we go along is not the way forward. If it were, things would never have changed in the first place.
Actually the main reason safety improved in aviation is that the engines stopped failing or catch fire. SOPs are a big tale, they are not significantly improving your chance to survive, good engines do. 100 years of aviation are here to prove it. SOPs (and QAR) became a kind of religion, because they appeared at the same time we were able to produce engines that wouldn't catch fire every now and then. A religion, and a way for the managment to be control freak on their pilots in a field they don't understand: flight.
SOPs are here to decrease our pilot skills, especially when SOPs (and QARs) encourage the use of auto-pilot, SOPs are the devil modern pilots have sold their soul to while there are no serious study showing SOPs are helping for a large part in safety.
More and more crashes are the only result, nowadays, of unskilled pilots. How to be able to respect SOPs in abnormal situation if you never went out of it in normal condition? This is misunderstanding human being, its nature, skills, and training-learning curve abilities. What sense does it make to have a QAR for long landing on a 3800 meters long runway when you do it on purpose and exactly know how much runway length remains for you after touching down EXACTLY where you intended to? What if you wanted to give your FO some freedom for him to learn, while being aware that way enough runway was available for a full stop (I am not speaking about a short runway here)? So you take control to avoid a QAR, and general pilot skills and training are decreasing. This is all nonsense. And when the same FO will become captain he will get of the runway end because of a lack of training and REAL LIFE experience, unable to correct or to take the decision to go around, because unable to understand how much runway is needed while flying behind the airplane overwhelmed by the situation. It happens more and more those times. Not a single QAR in your file, but a crash at the end. Really worth it?
Yes on a given day, flying below 10 000 feet with all the automatics/FD switched on, especially in difficult condition such as weather-night-some system failure will help you a great deal. But repeating everyday this scenario in normal condition will decrease your skills and at the end will make of you a possible threat. And that's precisely what SOPs are encouraging.