The humans I've seen were all based on accumulated experience. That's not of much use if you find yourself in an entirely novel one.
see what i did here?
Humans have a generalised ability to solve novel problems with accumulated knowledge and experience of nearby or similar situations and intuition. There have been numerous instances posited in this thread where humans adapted on the fly to unanticipated or unprecedented scenario's that they had not been trained for. CX780, QF32, Sioux city, Sully and a slew of others. A good primer on the subject of intuition (and it's flaws) is Daniel Kahneman's unexpected best seller "
Thinking Fast and Slow", noting the work of his antagonist collaborator Gary Klein on
Naturalistic decision-making.
In the interest of honest debate, humans are also completely capable of screwing it up, and required strict Standard Operating Procedures has to be developed trained and complied with to save them from themselves, that for most part pilots against their will are required to function as automatons. The hull loss rate suggest we have probably optimised the hybrid between the advantages that automation can provide and human tolerance for novelty and ambiguity for "out of design" scenario's.
Can you please point to a generalised problem solving artificial intelligence system that can solve and adapt to an unprecedented novel scenario in real time? Because that is the humans bring to the game.