Your flying a coupled Cat 3A approach into EGLL. It's 200m in fog. At decision height, when you don't see the required visual references, are you
REALLY going to push the thrust levers forward and pull the yoke back, as your
FIRST actions?
In my opinion, definitely YES!! We clearly have been trained very differently.
At that moment, you are 50' above a runway you can't see. You've just disengaged the autopilot, and depending on the sequencing of your actions, you could well be holding the thrust levers against the drive motors, until you push TOGA.
In my experience, 50 feet above the runway in fog is not a bad and dangerous place to fly a plane manually. It is my opinion that the pilot should manually advance the throttles while pressing TOGA and manually establish the correct climb attitude (the FD should provide that). Once the aircraft is confirmed to be climbing and accelerating the pilot should clean up the aircraft and re-engage the autopilot and autothrottle.
I really don't understand why any pilot would think that automatics are required or even preferable when slow and close to the ground. This is not much different than a takeoff except you already have a little bit of altitude and you have a LOT more runway in front of you.
In the words of Sergeant Wilson: "Are you sure that's wise"?
My training says manual flying would not only be wise, but preferable in this situation. In any event my training would compel me to put hands on stick and throttle during this maneuver so if the automatics go awry or for some reason quit, I'm in a position to correct things immediately and instinctively without having to mentally review system logic, inhibition logic, or flight modes.
We're flying a passenger jet here. We don't really want to be exploring the aerobatic envelope 'a la' HOTAS F18!
Oh my!! HOTAS is a design philosophy for putting various combat system buttons and switches on the stick and throttle to allow a pilot of a tactical jet to control those systems without taking his hands off stick and throttle. It has NOTHING to do with aerobatics! I flew the same way when flying P-3s and a four engine turboprop derived from an airliner is mostly certainly not aerobatic. Neither is the P-8 which is derived from the B737.
In a passenger jet the only switches and buttons a pilot needs for a Takeoff or Go Around/Rejected Landing are TOGA and radio PTT and remarkably enough, both are on the stick and throttle. Why is that? Because those switches are designed to be operated by the pilot while his hands are on the stick and throttle! So I don't understand why anyone would train a pilot to put his hands in his lap during maneuvers that are at low airspeed when close to the ground. That is contrary to all my training and experience. Clearly some (many?) airlines train very differently. And in this case, that training set these pilots up for failure.