Originally Posted by
rickair7777
How in the hell do I "stay current" on that kind of flying? Come in for some extra sim time on my days off? Nevermind, the company doesn't give out free sim time anyway. Our proficiency checks focus on managing the autopilot, not hand flying...we do one handflown ILS, with the FD, usually starting AFTER we are established on the LOC/GS.
In 6+ years and about 4000 hours of airline flying I have never had a deferred autopilot. At my company we are not allowed to handfly above FL200.
It's not about being manly here, it's about safety. For most RJ drivers the right answer is to not do a complex non-prec approach with multiple risk factors and no AP.
I'm not talking about machoism, or coolness, or manliness. I could not care less about that stuff. I'm not talking about extra time in the sim. All I'm saying is, in preparation for the possibility that the autopilot will fail, or the possibility of it being deferred, being able to hand fly it without worrying about safety being affected does not seem too unreasonable, or crazy, to me. Being able to fly an approach is not too crazy and unreasonable, to me. It doesn't matter if you are trained to do it in the sim, or not. It's called having the ability to fly the airplane in the IFR environment. How is that unreasonable???