More a necessary core skill. If you are going to steer through the FD inputs, there had better be a good reason as it is not safe practice to do this at night, during the departure, with pax on board, with the PM not monitoring…

Hand flying is important and should happen. But not like that. The risks are self-evident.

Is there an outbreak of inability to read and comprehend instruments, or are we now seeing the result of excessive reliance on automation to do the simple things in life? Even our latrines have automated functions as tidying up after ourselves has become a bridge too far, like being able to walk and chew gum, climb and complete a turn to a new WPT or initial heading... perhaps it is time to revert a number of our drivers to 2-D operations as 3-D seems to be resulting in excessive demand on the spatial orientation, SA and cognitive skill sets of those that are overtaxed by what should be a routine and enjoyable part of the task.

We have captains that cannot work out when they need to rotate the aircraft, "is that before or after the end fence?"
We have drivers that have an affinity for low level dive bomb profiles,
We have drivers that manage to park B767s into the pond at 45 degrees in response to nonsense in front of them, VMC(ish)...
We have people who shut down props instead of selecting flaps, and don't work out before stalling the toy what they did....
We have an ATC system in the first world that seems to be acopic, and drivers who appear to rely on the infallibility of ATC as the justification to not bothering to look at where they are about to park their own aircraft (not always, sometimes the red cap and the D are on the crew from north of the border, who speak funny and seem to have a problem with 28R.... )

Do we need a 24 hour stand down to get our collective heads out of our butts, and to give vocational options to those that should be more comfortable with Nintendo than a plane filled up with cargo that happens to have others that might care as to their disposition and future serviceability of the individual? Plonking bits of humanity into untidy barricaded hazmat zones is just a bad look, but we seem to be getting lots of attempts to do so. We have been doing this for a looooooooong time, and the recognition of the issues of the HMI and cognitive constraints of humans has had a lot of airtime and remediation, and it seems that we are about where we started, a long time back. Process progress is normally from left to right, although a number of languages would argue differently to that, but, we seem to be having a reprise of Ground Hog Day.

Probably all happened in the old days. It just got hidden among all the CFIT’s, microbursts, and mechanical failures.

to an extent, quite so. We had SAS park a 4 holer off Santa Monica, we had Pan Am knowing the 7 seas, intimately, we did barrel rolls in B707s inadvertently... perhaps beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but we are supposed to be be "safe" today, cuz we got rhythym systems, fancy stuff to make it all right, we have magenta, we have EGPWS, we have everything other than Doug the Dog and the balloons on Mr Fredrickson's house.... We got it all, and we are still drooling into our oat meal as far as situational awareness goes, and cognition. Something stinks and it isn't Dougs food bowl, (he did well in his Sopwith).

We are much safer than in the olden days, and yes, all those bells and whistles do help. And of course we still have incidents happen and we continue to learn from them and improve further. I’m not less of a pilot now that the autopilot flies the TCAS avoidance, or the plane automatically reports braking action in roll out so that others get a nearly real time update.

But i have to say, i really enjoyed that rant, very well done indeed ;)

"We got it all, and we are still drooling into our oat meal as far as situational awareness goes, and cognition."

Everything is continually changing; we often forget about ourselves and the safety system we inhabit.

‘Wayfinding’ Michael Bond
"Modern humans interact with the world in much the same way that prehistoric humans did. We may travel further and faster, and we have some fabulously clever instruments to help us get around, but the manner in which we use our brains to stay orientated is not so different,
We scout landmarks, attend to our surroundings, memorise vistas, build 'cognitive maps' and generally keep our spatial wits about us, just as the hunter-gatherers of the Pleistocene did. Some of us are a lot better at this than others, and that is the way it has always been.
At least, this was the case until around the year 2000; since then, a great deal has changed. Many of us now delegate all that cognitive heavy lifting to GPS-enabled navigation tools, which guide us where we want to go without us having to attend to anything. Follow the blue dot on your smartphone app or obey your satnav's spoken instructions and you'll arrive at your destination without having troubled the place cells in your hippocampus or the decision-making circuitry of your prefrontal cortex. You won't have to know how you got there or remember anything about the route you took. For the first time in the history of human evolution, we have stopped using many of the spatial skills that have sustained us for tens of thousands of years."

… pay attention to the surroundings, build a mental map, shape character of items, links, sequence of turns.

GPS turns the world into abstract embedded in a digital device. Web searches, instant answers, we exchange for absolute certainty, we sacrifice our sense of place - replacing cognitive skill with technology - reassign mental resource.
Situation awareness; perception, comprehension, - sufficient to identify required SOP; yet SOPs imply completeness, an assured outcome; thus no projection aspect of SA, no thinking ahead, being ready for surprises.
Technology promotes the use of automated response strategies - like a robot.

The issue is not to stop using the phone (technology), its being aware of the decision and the effects it might have … we move through the world unaware, and not be affected by our lack of knowledge. No immediate raw experience of the real, we miss the opportunity to develop rich knowledge an rich remembering.

Also; in a very safe industry, training emphasis on SOP compliance oppose the skills required to manage the unexpected.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9o7da1hmi5fsr0z/From individuals to the evolution of safety paradigms Paries +++.pdf?dl=0
"operators will find it even more difficult to construct a ‘mental model’ of the machine and to predict and understand what it is doing. We already know the associated negative effects: overconfidence in the machine; loss of comprehension; issues with alertness; loss of basic know-how, which remains crucial in degraded mode. "

https://link.springer.com/content/pd...031-07805-7_13

https://www.researchgate.net/profile...ication_detail

FDR well said as usual...The old photo of a ragwing of some sort hanging in the lone tree in the otherwsie clear pasture comes to mind...basics...

I am somewhat out of date with the newer Boeing's, but back in my B747 days some, but not all, had Flap Load relief? I say not all because on an SP type a Captain 'thought' it had it and over sped the flap limits and reported the system had not worked in the Tech Log; the subsequent inspection required removal and NDT of the flap carriage bolts, a some-what major job. I should have expected such a system would have been easily installed on a digital age B787?
On another occasion during the antiquated post major maintenance stall check, the senior Capt. had to push the RB211's to the wall to avoid a @.
Flight recovered and all aboard chuckled, until the QAR read out came through, 3 of 4 engines had exceeded their N1 limits, again left to Engineering/Maintenance to sort out.
Luckily for the above Captains they were not flying for a QR type Co.

Having flown both old "clockwork" dials and modern screens, I like the screens and it makes things easier, however. The old gauges required the driver to create a mental image of where they were, I guess it's SA, whereas reliance on screens with pretty pictures means that is not quite as necessary.