Looking back on my entire career of flying seatbelts have never saved my ass while TCAS has on more than one occasion.
Seat belts have certainly saved mine.
I'm one of those people that hand flies the departure, as a rule. I usually hand-fly until about FL270 or so, before engaging the autopilot. Above that altitude, we're required to use automated altitude control as part of our RVSM certification.
We can't engage the autopilot until flaps are up in any case, which for us normally takes place between 4,000' and 5,500 above the departure field elevation. In some locations such as Kabul where we keep our speed slow to reduce turn radius and climb rate high during the departure, we may be close to 18,000' before we're working on raising the flaps after takeoff. It depends on the circumstances.
I'm also one of those guys that often uses the autopilot during the descent, arrival, and landing. Sometimes I hand fly, sometimes I don't.
The autopilot is a tool to be used, like anything else in the cockpit, and it allows to expand my circle of awareness at times when workload is high. You might say it's like adding a little extra mental RAM at times when my processor is working hard.
Certain locations where I go, the approach signal often gets unstable at certain points in the approach. This is known and part of the environment (along with frequency jamming, laser and other attacks during final, etc). Using the autopilot can greatly enhance safety, but there are times when the airplane may start to get unstable along with the signal, and disconnecting the autopilot to hand fly is the better choice. Sometimes I perform autolands, and sometimes, most of the time, I land by hand. During exceptionally low visibility conditions, I use two or more autopilots during the approach, and have no qualms about it.
I consider many visual approach days to be practice days for the bad weather; I divide my time between concentrating on maintaining proficiency with the automation and avionics, and doing hand flying techniques.
Our airplane has no "feel" to it; that is, one doesn't really feel what the airplane is doing, the same as one might do with a light piston airplane or light turbojet. Feel computers are built in to give us an artificial sense of what's going on, as there's no control feedback, but hand flying is still following the instruments.
When I do climbs or descents on autopilot, I prefer to use the manual pitch wheels, just like I did in a King Air or Piaggio. I feel I have more direct control over what I'm doing, and when I do things like drop the gear out of 22,000' to cool it before going into some of the places we go, it allows me to keep up with the speed decay by pitching down faster to maintain a given airspeed, rather than playing catch up by commanding an airspeed or descent rate. This is a compromise between hand-flying and using automation; one isn't doing anything more than flying the airplane, just using different controls that one's hand on the column to make it happen.
Go ahead and hand fly every descent and landing if you wish; it may be incorrect to condemn others who do differently than you, however; different isn't necessarily wrong.
