Do you think these incidents didn't happen before automation? Aircraft have been crashing since long before the flight director was invented because humans got disorientated and couldn't interpret their instruments.
I'm well aware of that. However, this brilliant one should have kept his mouth shut instead of appearing right after the fact, live, on television. Furthermore, he wasn't claiming disorientation. he was claiming that modern instrumentation is inadequate and unuseable past a few degrees up and down. In particular, he was seeing a field of brown on the indicator, and had no idea based on what he saw how to recover. He didn't understand the concept of a sky pointer, or how to read his instruments. It wasn't just disorientation...it was a very basic lack of flying ability. Going way back to basic instrument training...instrument interpretation, crosscheck, and aircraft control. If one can't even understand the instruments, then the rest is an academic impossibility, or at best, a gamble.
He was gambling by being in the airplane, and the company, by putting him there. In my book, that's criminal.