John,
The words
From that day onwards I have believed that automatics are better at flying than me.
coming from someone with your (VERY) impressive background have a very profound meaning.
To (probably) most of us, flying is a lot more than just short-term 'handling' or 'controlling' an aircraft, which I believe is what you are referring to in your statement. I could not agree more with you in that sense, as I did my end-of-degree thesis on adaptive automatic flight control systems.
It is in the decision-making involved and the medium-to-long-term flight management (and this includes the human factor in the 'payload' as well) where a human crew can excel in a lot of ways.
In some of the scenarios theoretised here for the Spanair accident, a human could have saved the situation better than certain automatic systems (these are after all created by humans), but we must admit that the statistical likelihood is probably low.
However, the statistical likelihood of automatics saving flight situations better than humans is probably very high.
Still, for carrying humans, I would like to keep another human (somehow) in the loop...but this is maybe for another thread.
Thx for your (VERY) valuable input!