Wayne, how do you know, "...the best landings on commercial liners seem to be on average when on auto."

Did the pilots make a Public Address and say, "Have no fear, we are going to do an auto-land." or words to that effect? I know for a fact, that in the USA, on all USA Air Carriers, we almost never do autolandings, only when the weather requires it, or the system needs to be tested. To maintain it's Category 3 Autoland status, the airplane must do one every 30 days.

We will sometimes get a note on our flight plan that says, "Autolanding required prior to..." with a date on it, and if we are not near that date, we don't do it. The poor sod who gets the plane on the last day has to do it.

The weather I'm talking about is not rain or gusty winds, it is fog. Once fog (or snow) obscures visibility down to below half a mile, we are required to make auto landings. Now, in England and Ireland, I know they get a lot more foggy days, so there may be quite a bit more auto-lands required, I don't know what their national carriers (Air Lingus, BA, Virgin, etc.) tell their pilots to do on a sunny day. Maybe like the Asians, they are required to auto land every time.

The autopilots will do a pretty good job and give you a consistent -ok- landing, but if want a real grease job, it will be done by a human, but...if you had a really bad landing, that was also done by a human! Also, the auto landing system has a lower crosswind limit. On the 777 the max autoland crosswind is 25knts, where as the non autoland limit is 38knts.

So if the cross winds are over 25, you can't autoland it anyway, you must hand fly it, but with that much wind, there is never a visability problem, ie. it's always a mile or two vis. with that much wind, where fog gets the thickest, lowest vis. is with calm winds.