Avmech
You show an incredible lack of awareness for someone from a body of people which claims higher intelligence. You obviously missed my point completely. You have the leisure to figure out why the link doesn't engage, as well as the expertise. You can saunter over to your van and get a book out if you need to. We, on the other hand have to figure it out as well as obeying air traffic, following a profile, getting the aircraft to do what we want, making sure that the checks are done, avoiding obstacles and the ground!. Not that your example is particularly dangerous; I can fly manually and often do. However, the point is that when things go wrong and you are distracted from your usual rythm, this is when things get missed and you may get a snowball effect. As I said before, you only ever get to hear about the times when we get it wrong and if you think about it proportionately in terms of the number of worldwide airborne technical difficulties, I think that we do rather well.
The main reason you don't hear of any engineering related fatalities these days is because it's an easier variable to control and in the main very much a black and white decision process. You're all very competent, I'm sure, but you never feel the pressure like we do sometimes.
All this wasn't said in order to make us seem better than you in any way at all. You have your job and we have ours; neither would have a job without the other but it does rankle a bit when engineers sneer at us quoting accident figures when they couldn't cause a major accident except willfully. In short, humans can't be trusted to do a good job 100% of the time, but in the air it has to be a calculated and accepted risk.
BUS
They're all lined up, ready for you.