Originally Posted by
cessnapete
A friend of mine in a British airline recently converted to the A380. During route operations has never flown the aircraft with manual thrust control, strict SOP bans manual practice in any circumstances. Apart from takeoff and initial climb,has only "flown" the aircraft manually when established on final approach, normally well below 1000ft. As a passenger I find this frightening.
That's because you practice in the simulator and not on a revenue leg with pax on board.
That comment may have been taken out of context.
My first captain on my first jet coined the term "pilot stuff".
As in once in a while you'll be called upon to do "pilot stuff".
Most of the time you sit there looking out the window enjoying the world going by essentially waiting for the next time you'd have to do some "pilot stuff".
Whenever we had a non-normal condition creep up inside or outside of the airplane he'd kinda shrug his shoulders and say " it's time to do some pilot stuff".
This includes malfunctions, weather, arrivals or departure procedures going pear shaped on you.
In the above discussion we're getting bogged down in the procedure bs technique argument.
We should never forget we get paid to do the occasional "pilot stuff".
The airplane can be on autopilot but the pilot isn't.
So we have a fender bender in traffic.
What do we do? Blame the car/driver in front of us?