Ref to my earlier comments on AF447 it would be foolish of me to argue that a good sense of energy management and instinctive understanding of what the aircraft should be doing in relation to known ptich and power is not aided by hand flying. My point is that this argument is overly simplistic and fails to address some fundamental issues that no level of hand flying skill can address or indeed have guaranteed that the pilots could have flown the aircraft out of danger. I think that view is wrong and does no justice to the crew that had to deal with the situation.
There is so much more to it. I have been in an IFR situation where I have lost confidence in the information that is being presented by the instrumentation and without outside visual clues, re-established spatial orientation by reverting back to the basics of attituide flying that I learned so many years ago.
The techncology that is being put on flight decks is more advanced than the understanding of how humans have to interface with it, especially in high stress scenarios. The fact is that the accident was a total system failure, that can be traced right back to errors in the physical design, certification, and training but yet the accident report puts so much emphasis on pilot error. I think that is wrong and cycnical.
I wonder in reality how many of us would have safely flown the aircraft out of danger, given the exact same circumstances, hot shot manual pilot or not. I dread to think.