Lonewolf I think you are missing the point. The training captains in Amsterdam and SFO both failed to spot deteriorating airspeed with the autothrottle in a mode where they obviously thought they had speed protection. Fairly obviously this was not the main cause of those accidents, but a contributory factor as perhaps misunderstanding the logics of the automatics (as suggested by others) may have been here. In this case there seems to have been a lack of thrust causing the aircraft to sink back onto the runway. Sufficient thrust was either spooled up too late or not at all. I can share your frustration that hand flying skills have deteriorated so far. But the reality is that experienced crews with many thousands of hours (or perhaps because of many thousands of hours using the automatics) do not seem capable of basic stuff. Human factors design of procedures and training needs to take account of this. So far I have not seen a lot of progress on this, with perhaps the exception of A350 conversion starting with some automatics off flying in the sim.