I have absolutely no knowledge of how the airbus is operated, as I fly the American competition. But recently I was flying with a 2000 hr F/O who told me that he had only one hour (yes really) on aircraft without glass cockpit. He had flown his trial lesson in a Cessna 150, then flown glass cockpit Cessna singles, glass cockpit piston twins, then the 737 NG. He was talking about the difficulty of his last OPC when given an FMC failure he had to fly a VOR hold (albeit still with Flight Director, FPV, Autopilot and Auto throttle).
This set me thinking about this incident.
At the last but one airline I flew for, a now defunct European charter operator, the absolute minimum experience for a captain was 5000 hrs, and most had far more. I used to fly with first officers who had been 737 captains previously but who could not be given a command because of this requirement, which was non-negotiable.
The reason that it was non-negotiable was because it was pure charter flying. If a charter came up to somewhere no one had been to, maybe with no approach aids or high terrain, or political issues, or anything else, you were expected to be able to take the crew and aircraft there, making full use of the experience of the F/O and the cabin crew, get the job done, and come home.
You were not expected to depart to a Greek Island, arriving after dark (based on the incident happening at 1523z at the beginning of January) and then elect to fly a visual approach, being handled by the pilot in the right hand seat who couldn't see what was happening because he was on the wrong side of the aeroplane, turning in the dark towards the terrain, not because you had to but because you wanted to play with some half assed non SOP "technique" that you had been shown in the sim instead of spending an extra 2 minutes going over the Pathos VOR and flying the procedural ILS.
Drawing circles around fixes on the runway threshold, and ninety degree abeam lines, and timing from abeam the threshold and all that other good stuff is primarily done because we have to train visual approaches in the simulator, but the visuals only go to ninety degrees and you cant actually see the runway until you are almost on finals. What happened to gear down and an intermediate flap setting abeam the threshold, turn finals after a couple of miles, about 500fpm descent on base then land flap once you see the papis and turn onto final, or something similar?
The problem now is that it doesn't happen anymore, and there is too much political correctness in the flight deck. Why have the F/O fly a visual approach if there is a left hand circuit, or the captain if it is right hand, unless it requires a Captains only landing? Unless you are circling by prescribed tracks (which for European pilots might mean places like Salzburg or Dubrovnik) then all you are really doing is flying a visual circuit, but most new pilots now have only flown five visual circuits in a transport size jet, or indeed none if they have flown a ten tonne turbo prop and done ZFT training.
In the "good old days", Dinosaurs like myself were still flying IFR around in the Northern European weather in ropy old piston twins with fixed card RBIs and CDIs when they had the experience levels this Captain had. We then flew turboprops and jets as F/O and (in my case) got into the left hand seat of a 60 tonne jet with maybe 10,000 hours. In the same AAIB bulletin as this incident there are three other airbus incidents (and they could just have easily been Boeing), two from EZ and one from small planet airlines. In those three incidents the PIC had over or just under 10000 hours with a minimum of 5000 on type, so why was the Captain in this incident a "safety management pilot", if that is true, with only 300 hours of experience on aircraft other than glass cockpit aircraft. At the risk of being politically incorrect what did he actually bring to that role? (and if he was a trained accident investigator with thousand of hours flying experience as a navigator in the air force I apologise, but I suspect he wasn't).
I guess this has been a long way around to the supporting the "airmanship" camp. The magenta line, the autopilot, the auto throttle, makes life safer, in the same way as years ago the RMI and HSI and flight director did. By the time you get to the left hand seat of an airliner you should not be prepared to experiment with a load of passengers on board. The job is not about having fun, or feeling good about yourself, it is about getting the passengers somewhere with no fuss and without frightening them. Learn new stuff in the sim, don't try it out on the line if you haven't done it before and it's not an SOP. If you think it should be an SOP tell talk to the chief pilot. Don't make stuff up as you go along.