Originally Posted by
cattletruck
Degraded automation is an encyclopaedic volume all its own where the pilot has to fault find, improvise, challenge, ignore, crosscheck, etc a system that he/she has little insight into it's inner workings. It is in my experience that some people are just miles better at fault finding than others.
This is the important point (if slightly missed!) - does the addition of new fangled automation increase or reduce training requirement? Answer of course is that it increases it big time. So something has to give and this is my point, the need to be able to fly immaculately AP out or with just the basic AP is becoming a redundant skill. You just need to be able to get by without actually hitting fsd on the loc and gs for that once in several lifetimes need to fly manually. (I am of course talking about the latest generation with multiple redundancies, not the 20 year old tech that is not that reliable or redundant.)
And all that endless engine failure on takeoff / landing training - something that NEVER happens in reality - just how much time should we be spending on that vs the complexities of partial automation?