[Joeaksa]

Originally Posted by rick-l

So were they just twisting knobs and typing in numbers when the autopilot horn went off?

Most pilots, especially ones flying the more modern airplanes are taught from day one to let the autopilot fly the plane. The powers that be feel that its smoother but in fact its turning the pilots into a "cockpit manager" and when things get difficult and the autopilot kicks off they are not used to hand flying, which is not a good thing.

The recent Air France had the pilots flying for up to 4 minutes at altitude with no autopilot. It will be interesting to see if this played a factor. "At altitude" hand flying is not fun and they were doing this in the dark with a heavy airplane in the middle of bad weather, just where you would really appreciate an autopilot.