Yesterday the media had a great news story about airplane automation & pilot complacency. The story was about how pilots are relying too much on airplane automation. Airplane automation is all the computers, & guidance that helps the pilots by reducing their workload. Such tools include the auto pilot, flight director, flight guidance controller, auto throttles, flight management system (fms) and (hud) or head up display. All of this fancy equipment does a wonderful job of reducing pilot workload & stress. The media story is based on a safety review board study who looked at two previous accidents. One was Air France Flight 447 that crashed after a two hour flight over the Atlantic Ocean in 2009. The other accident was Colgan Airlines flight 3407 over Buffalo, NY. In both accidents there were disturbing reports on how the pilots perform routine flying maneuvers. In both cases the airplane was being flown by the auto pilot initially & then it disengaged. Whatever unusual event that occurred to kicked off the auto pilot in both cases the pilots perform the wrong procedure in what shouldn't been a routine simple procedure. The safety board came to the conclusion that pilots are not manually flying enough. Well it is true that pilots use the auto pilot a lot. In my opinion I don't think that the government needs to create further regulation for this issue. Most pilots are professional enough to know when they need to practice hand flying. I witness very few pilots who place the auto pilot on immediately after takeoff. Most pilots I know fly manually up to 10,000 ft. while others fly up 18,000. A lot of pilots I know including myself also practice outside of work by using a microsoft flight sim on the home computer. This is a wonderful piece of equipment for the public as well as for pilots. The flight sim allows you to download any aircraft in the world & all the world's airports. It also allows good practice for pilots to practice their instrument scan, which is critical when you lose automation in the real airplane. It even allows you to practice tricky approaches at some complex airports. It also allows you to set up random failures to test your emergency procedures. I know a lot of pilots who practice using these flight sim games, and I suspect it's a industry standard. In fact, some airlines are FAA approved to use these microsoft sims for ground based training. Although the safety board did a great study, one oversight they failed to mention is that we had some of the safest years in flying these last several years.The industry and pilots groups must work together to fine a equal balance for using automation, but I think further regulation is not necessary at this point.