The process of manually flying a jet in cruise is normally a trivial exercise. The hardest part is accurate altitude maintenance. This used to be done with 1/2 dot pitch corrections and a few degrees wing down to get back on the exact heading desired.
With RVSM airspace, when does anyone get a chance to practice even this simple, almost mechanistic skill?
If this was really a case of PF hauling the nose up as is being intimated in some of the news leaks, then AF447 was not an outlier.
Meanwhile, I remain skeptical that a 2000+ hour copilot would have difficulty manually flying in level flight in cruise, even in Alternate law. The explanation that the crew did it is just too pat.
