Computers and other sorts of automation make life in cockpit easier but they can and they do fail. So do we think that we can do without them? It's not enough to merely think so - ability to safely fly airplane with automatics disabled must be demonstrated to apropriate aviation authority to get type rated. In layspeak: if you can't fly it without computer, you will not be allowed to fly it at all. And you won't get TR if you don't know how to work your airplane's computers either.
This must take time, during which the aircraft could be plummeting out of the sky.
Well if there's threat of "plummeting out of the sky" one deals with it immediately but guess what - 99.99% of unusal occurences during flight do not include even remote threat of "plummeting". I just had a complete autopilot failure the other day and as you haven't heard of me on CNN you can guess the outcome. But to spoil the guessing game for you - neither cabincrew nor passengers noticed anything unusual despite the airplane being (gosh
) handflown for almost half an hour. And I'm just your average first-officer, not some highly skilled clone of Chuck Yeager.
Regarding your "Canadian aircraft that dropped of the sky" - that tells everything one needs to know about the credibility of the movie you're refering to. It was certainly not Canadian, it was Swissair flight 111 in 1998. And either you or moviemakers got it wrong; even if the crew turned towards the nearest airport at the first trace of smoke it would be too late. Also there was no way of identifying source of fire and no way to switch off the server from the cockpit even if the crew knew it was the culprit. The cockpit burnt out even before plane hit the water. To say that this made following "protocols" difficult would be severe understatement.
Everything in commercial air transport should be done by the book but then every book has a caveat that says something like: "Nothing presented in this manual should prevent pilot in comand from exercising his/her best judgment and authority in assuring the safe conduct of flight". I'm thankful that situations requiring deviating from the checklist are so rare that I have never met in person any pilot who had to deviate from laid procedures to save the day. And we're not expected to "train so many sim hours", we're required by law to train for emergencies in sim at least twice a year.
Just my 1 fils (0.001 BHD) worth.