Originally Posted by ZapBrannigan

Great question. I’ve always thought that if they really wanted us to have manual control of the throttles on approach when hand flying, why not just deselect SPEED? That would put the autothrottles in ARM mode, so you have full control and aren’t fighting the servo, however Alpha Floor protection remains armed. So if you get distracted and slow, the autothrottles would wake up and save the day. They can’t do that if they’re off.