I grew up in the steam driven days and flew a huge selection of GA aircraft in diverse environs before graduating to needles & dials jets and finally the TV generation. The basic manual skills were honed in the early years as solid foundations and maintained via daily use. Indeed we flew to many places where they were the only options. I've always been of the view that passengers climb aboard with total faith that we shall deliver them safely to their destination, or somewhere on suitable terra firma. If things go well the former will occur; if not the latter might. They trust that when the automatics, that are there to reduce workload and not takeover command, misbehave we shall takeover control and resolve the issue with a safe landing. My Ops management felt similarly and expected the same professional outcome, and thus trained us accordingly and expected us to maintain those trained skills. We were an insurance policy for when things go amiss. The pax and company expected, absolutely, the insurance policy to pay out when the claim was made. They did not expect any 'trying to wriggle out of it' at the crunch.
NASA"s boys brought the hugely automated shuttle and capsule back to earth when various electrons went on holiday. How?
The philosophy today seems to be to design more automatic back up systems so that the 'so-called pilot' just watches as another automatic system takes over from the errant automatic system. That can work fine if the initial failure is as per what the designers have envisaged in their design studio. Unfortunately the real world, including mother nature, has a habit of throwing up unforeseen hiccups. The untrained unskilled pilot is then left with a bag of bolts and bits a string connected to nothing and a head full of questions with no answers. There is even a strong possibility that in the darkness of knowledge any pilot intervention could make it worse and the downward spiral goes into unrecoverable mode.
There are failures, never dreamed of under the "that should never happen category", where it is recoverable but was screwed up. e.g. we've seen the static ports covered up, and pitot failures where basic skills were found wanting. Fuselage icing of sensors that caused computers to malfunction totally. And finally catastrophic loss of thrust scenarios. I wonder what would happen in a real, at night, total loss of AC event. And then we'll find it was never trained for, just demonstrated to tick a box.
I do find it shameful that the annual LPC demands manual skills to be demonstrated when they are actively discouraged on a daily basis. One wonders if the tolerances employed at checks are as stiff as they used to be, or should be. Anyone who thinks 15 minutes in a sim can create the competent manual skills that every pilot should posses needs a reality check. Unfortunately there are HOTs that do, or are not allowed to provide the depth of training they would like and are not allowed to encourage on-line practice of the dark arts.
I suspect the techies, with all their back-up systems, will win the day. The risk managers will argue that the next Sully will be another 20 years away. The truth is there are probably incidents every day, some become accidents, that do not receive any awareness or publicity. Some will be prevented, or saved, by good skills because it was lucky that captain XYZ was on board instead of ABC. Luck should not play such a large part in accident prevention.
The end is nigh. The time to be really worried is when cost savings means switching off the light at the end of the tunnel.