@roulis:
I think you misunderstand me - that's not what I was getting at. The point I was trying to make is precisely what I said, namely that technology is just a tool - in and of itself it cannot make a difference in terms of, as you put it, "add"ing or "deny"ing anything.
The point that I think Learmount is trying to make, and one I've seen echoed on here is that the industry - particularly those in airline management - have tended to apply the use and training of some technologies (and SOPs) in such a way that the basics of aerodynamics and aircraft handling techniques have become sidelined to a degree.
This isn't something that can be laid at the door of technological progression in my opinion - in fact I'd say it has more to do with modern airline management being of the MBA generation and trained in general business models rather than being long-term "airline" people brought up from the ranks, as it were. The reason I believe this is because in most industries, there is little need for basic recurrent training - once the basics are ingrained they stay there, and even if the occasional lapse or bad habits start to drift in, it's not usually a safety issue. Operating complex machinery, and particularly large transport vehicles such as aircraft is very much a different beast though, because techniques such as hand-flying and maintaining scan require a degree of co-ordination, and in the case of the latter, repetitive tasks - something that humans are innately unsuited for, and as such, bad habits need to be found and nipped in the bud as soon as possible.
As such, the intent behind every generation of airliner technology as I see it has been to assist the human pilot with as much of the "grunt work" as possible and reduce the amount and level of repetitive tasks that the human pilot must perform. Later generations of autoflight technology and the separate concept of FBW also assist in keeping the aircraft pointed in the right direction and with the shiny side up. But even with this level of assistance, the technology does not absolve the human crew (or those who define their training) from things such as maintaining instrument scan and monitoring the aircraft functions. And, to the best of my knowledge, it never has done. If airline management has taken its eye off the ball there, and the regulators have failed to pick up on it, then this is a problem likely dispersed across the entire industry.
The same applies to the less repetitive, but equally important aspect that is maintaining knowledge of basic aircraft handling and hand-flying. For example, one thing which came out of AF447 was that with an industry-wide shift to focusing on stall prevention techniques at the expense of stall recovery in recurrent training, you effectively had pilots with a decade or more on the line and many thousands of flying hours who had nevertheless not practiced basic stall recovery techniques in recurrent training since they passed their PPL (or equivalent) at the very beginning of their career. This was not a result of technological impact, this was a case of the airlines interpreting the change in focus in a way that, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, was completely inappropriate. And for their part, the rest of the industry (manufacturers, regulators etc.) failed to pick up on this unintended consequence of the change.
I remember when the third interim report on AF447 was published after the flight recorder retrieval, and the subsequent incredulous dismay from many pilots on here on discovering that the PF made instant and aggressive control inputs upon AP disconnect that not only first caused the aircraft to bust the FL that they had been discussing as the safe maximum only a few minutes previously, but also - through near enough a minute of the stall warning sounding - maintained those aggressive nose-up inputs (being the precise opposite of what was required to avoid or recover from a full-blown stall) all the way to the ground. It's fair to say that the modern practice of having pilots switch in the autoflight at gear-up and off on finals (or even later) has allowed airlines to make some dubious decisions on training priorities, and it's true that this state of affairs wouldn't have been possible without the advancement in technology.
But it is the decisions made by human beings - *not* the technology itself, which is the crux of the matter. If the use of technology allows much of the day-to-day work of flight crews to avoid things like manual handling at high altitude (and lets not forget the fact that the technological advances have very much improved safety and efficiency in terms of normal ops), then the industry (primarily the airlines) *must* keep those basic skills current and honed to a decent edge some other way - meaning training that includes refreshers on maintaining scan, manual handling, stall recovery etc.