This hot topic is being beaten to death on many occasions via various threads. It is becoming circular; and in the end our opinion will count for nought. The powers that be, including XAA's DFO's, CP's & HOT's will decide, and I doubt the XAA's will dare to get involved too directly.
However, there does seem a consensus that manual flying skills and especially scanning skills have deteriorated to be close to danger levels. I agree with those who say hand flying during a climb at constant power following an FD is not going to maintain skills. There are too few changes. Below FL100 to landing is quite different, and traffic density and terrain/weather difficulty must be taken into consideration before 'practicing'.
What are the opinions on these:
1. manual flying allowed (not necessarily encouraged) but no FD is forbidden.
2. visual approaches allowed (not encouraged) but no finals inside OM and LNAV/VNAV data must be inserted for OM waypoint.
3. visual approaches policy is preferred to be flown with automatics.
4. If flown manually with LNAV/VNAV guidance A/T is encouraged to prevent low speed excursions.
Do these impositions encourage the maintenance of basic flying skills? or has this attitude........
Unfortunately not all can do so anymore with company policies dictating the level of automation that must be flown because "it's safer" or "reduces the amount of unstable approaches".
now become the norm? We have read that FAA, NTSB and even Airbus is beginning to advocate more manual flying to combat auto-dependancy. If airlines don't follow this philosophy what chance is there? FBW will be the norm for all pax jets within 15 years. There is that amount of time to sort this out.