PJ2
One final post at this stage, only in response to your excellent and thought provoking post, before I bow out.
I certainly don't want to get sucked into a philosophical debate about Airbus v Boeing (which admittedly you are trying to "kill off at birth" at this stage by your reference to the automation on board the B777 and also the impending B787) and for which you are far better qualified.
My "gripe" is the present interface between man and machine, which just feels unsatisfactory, and I could write for days on the disaster of manufacturers selling automation on the basis of crew cost savings.
If you are going to start pushing pilot error for AF447 "flying" into a stall and for not "flying" out of a stall, as per the media rush in some quarters upon publication of the 27 May 2011 BEA statement, flight crews simply have to have had a fair amount of (at least simulator) training at "flying" (i.e. direct law for Airbus pilots) at cruise altitude. How many have, to their own entire satisfaction? How many airlines facilitate small aircraft flying for their pilots? The one thing that I would say about many of my former colleagues who flew the Concordes - they were always flying one small plane or another in their own time e.g. Hutchinson and Cook.
To use a B777 example, to avoid Airbus-specific issues, it's easy enough for a flight crew to deal with an ice-blocked RR Trent engine FOHE leading to a single engine rollback at cruise altitude. The test of the interface is when you have a double engine rollback on final approach for the same reason, and whether that flight crew (having mostly been monitoring systems for 10 hours+) reacts quickly and decisively enough to adjust the flaps to at least get their B777 over the airport perimeter obstacles that could prove catastrophic. I am not convinced that there would invariably have been a "happy" outcome irrespective of flight crew (intra-airline, let alone inter-airline - is not part of the manufacturer agenda to keep-up with aviation demand to an extent that would push traditional pilot training resources beyond breaking point?).
My worry with the level of automation, which undoubtedly has prevented "pilot induced" accidents (you only have to look at the statistics), is where it leaves us when things suddenly go wrong and I mean really go awry e.g. such that the flight envelope degrades and the plane is handed over to the pilots in less than ideal circumstances (at night, with conflicting airspeed data, at cruise altitude, in inclement equatorial weather). That is where AF447 should be treated as a wake-up call, because I am not seeing many posts from current commercial pilots to the effect that modern training and SOPs have flight crews all ready for this eventuality.
I have my doubts about how alert and ready Capt Dubois in the LHS would have been, let alone his F/Os, but will keep my own counsel on this (at least until the full CVR transcript is released and we really know what was really happening in that cockpit, particularly as they were stalled and on their way down before Dubois even returned). We will see.
P.s. several old colleagues were devastated when their precious L-1011s were sold to the RAF, and they would vouch for every sentence in your post! Nothing more ever needs saying about the DC-10 being pressed into service (the Paris crash still angers, even after all these years, because of the earlier Windsor Ontario incident with that cargo door) when the Tristar was crippled by the RB211 induced bankruptcy/nationalisation at RR.