Per,
Both you and wonkerzoo speak the truth with the authority of having been there. I was subjected to a particularly nasty emergency very early in my flying career. Although we did a number of things wrong, we survived. It made me re-think many things about aviation, the most important being how one may react when something totally unexpected, outside any previous normal training regime, suddenly 'hits one in the face'.
It not only made me study much more diligently everything I could find out about the aircraft I was flying and about aviation in general, but it also led me to studying all the books I could find on the psychology of human reactions to fear and excessive workloads. The so-called 'startle effect' was not known by that name in those days, but my reading made very clear the way in which the primative part of the human brain can take over in extremis. Good training definitely helps to combat this, but, as Per has said, even the best trained individual can falter.
However much we study and behave and train as professionals, even the coolest skygod may find he has feet of clay.