Quote from me (emphasis added):
"... RAF transport flights generally do not demand the unruffled experience expected by the fare-paying, travelling public - on which commercial pilots' jobs depend."
Quote from
Ken Scott:
"Do we just wang it around any old how without a thought to our self-loading freight?"
Well Ken, presumably not, and I wasn't trying to hit a nerve!
Am sure the vast majority of all transport pilots take personal pride in the smoothness of their operation, as well as its efficiency.
The point I was trying to make is that at some stage in airlines - probably when digital AFSs and FADECs started to become the norm in the 1990s - airline flight-ops departments (no doubt influenced considerably by the bean counters) started to discourage or, in some cases, ban crews from practising the old skills of manual throttle and "manual" handling (with and without FD).
99% of the time today's automatics do as smooth and efficient a job as the most proficient pilot can in these areas. And they can do it hour after hour. That couldn't have been said for the various jets (including the VC10) I flew in the 1970s and most of the 1980s. So any resistance to the increasing pressure put on us not to interrupt the smooth, fuel-saving automatics was hard to justify.
Those of us who could remember handling big jets with manual thrust on long sectors when the (single) auto-pilot was u/s or hiccupping were well aware that the new generation of pilots - particularly the civil-trained ones - lacked comparable handling experience, and that this policy might be creating problems for the future. But few of us would have predicted what happened on AF447, the most extreme example so far.