It is generally agreed that automation addiction or automation dependency is the prime cause of a serious degradation in today's airline pilots manual raw data instrument flying skills. I think we are stuck with that forever as the manufacturer's and operators all are dead against anything other than full use of automatics.
One way however to force an improvement in manual flying skills is to require all instrument proficiency checks to be conducted on a 50/50 basis. Half the test session on automation to check that specific skill and the other half with no automatics and that includes the flight director off. Since the instrument proficiency test is usually over two hours then it means one hour of button pressing and one hour of pushing and pulling. Any takers?
The problem with that is probably 75% of current candidates would be unable to fly the manual raw data part of the test within the Regulator's skills test tolerances. If the pilot cannot pass that half of the test because of incompetence then someone has to make the decision to fail the candidate. That will inevitably cause some heart-ache in crewing. That costs more money to re-train the failed candidate. So it is back to full use of automatics all the time.
