Personaly I don't expect the guys I fly with to "pull something out of the bag".
I think the accident record has many examples of crashes caused by pilots "acting instinctively" in abnormal situations instead of .
Well, maybe...but when you said: "moving the aircraft to a safe place/configuration and then methodically managing the problem" would be a good example of an instinctive deployment of resources and skills. What I fear is
a mind-set that needs to resort to a rule book in moments of crisis.
To keep on thread, and also combine two arguments into one comment, let's give an example.
The point is moot anyway with the speed at which the NDB is being removed from service.
It'll be a while before they are just a memory, but I know what you mean. That trusty old beacon - like a fire in a clifftop Trinity House iron basket - has served us well for...strewth! more than half a century.
Taking off with an aircraft laden to the gunwales with fuel, passengers and every last bit of freight that the bean-counters can thrust upon us, is fairly straightforward - until we're flying on one engine, or perhaps, covered in ice. On board are the same passengers that expect us to pull 'something out of the bag' if something goes wrong. With hills either side, I would personally like to have a breadcrumb trail of beacons to guide me until I make safe altitude, now that the GPS track-log has become nothing more than a wish-list. That would be a good example of the use of small local beacons. After all, they're cheap, and in the absence of T-storms, pretty reliable. I don't think we should be in a rush to wave them goodbye.
Where I do see frightening departures from logical recovery from emergencies, is when a head, or even heads, go down into the office to instruct a piece of electronics to do the job the crew should 'instinctively' be able to do. At the end of the day, it all comes back to Davis' strongly worded pleas in his later edition of Handling the Big Jets. Also, I earned my living from electronics for years and have a love of modern systems, but it's when the basic flying is submerged in rules, that I get motivated to protest these points.