theUpsideDown

Yeah, American pilots have a very high comfort level hand flying as compared to the rest of the planet's airline pilots. That's why we have a very low go around rate, and a very high level of "saving it". The FAA in your study was talking about the pilot shutting his brain off when the autopilot came on and being terrible at monitoring it. But the newest media spectacle has been the FAA submitting to ICAO that some sort of hand flying program must start across the globe to get the rest of the pilots up to speed.

The FAA has even backed off 1000ft to stabilized approach or go around garbage because a couple airlines proved it was wrong headed . Until the approach gets below 500ft unstabilized, 97% of pilots can get the plane back in the right place before landing safely, which most of us who used to fly it the other way remember.

For instance, this might be before your time, the same year that study you quoted came out the dtw pilots had a fairly "standard" , non standard callout, of "flight director off set takeoff thrust". They'd hit their stupid TOGA buttons 1-8 times because most 200pilots had no idea what those buttons really did then remove the FD. They'd turn it back on above 10000 before engaging autopilot. Extremely common practice. So common FOQA finally put the smack down on the practice early 2016 when the FOQA guys finally caught the data for the FD was missing, in mid 2015 they started asking recurrent classes what the hell was going on with broken FDs (because they didn't naturally think pilots were shutting off everything). The excuse was, way back in 'Nam, Pinnacle used to make pilots shut off the FD from zero to 400ft due to a software glitch. Pilots liked it so much they just kept it off for takeoff and landing until many pilots just turned it on for autopilot use only. If the autopilot was like the DC9 a lot of 200 pilots would have left the FD off with the autopilot on.

American pilots and edv pilots hand fly a lot and there's guys like you who are telling peers to handfly even more. Our nation's culture is a hand flying culture. I'm guilty of it too, search my posts there should be one about, turn the auto off on the descent below 12000, and all the ways its better. Hand flying at multiple airspeeds and altitude level offs and trim settings and flying through the flap transitions. That's real flying. Take it from me, I spent the first 1000 plus hours hand flying the northeast with no auto pilot and no flight director, in a 19 seat airplane that, unlike the stupid rj, trimmed out correctly.

Flew 4 different airliners, CRJ is hands down the worst flying airplane autopilot on or off. Don't @ me. And I still think guys should hand fly it as much as I did anyway.