(quoting 'before landing checklist':-
Remember the designers have designed the system to be better then you and in doing so gave the system (whether inherent or by design) the ability to override what you ask of it. It knows best right?
And I do think in a lot of cases it probably does know best since a lot of the pilots now have limited flying skills.
From much less experience, 'before landing checklist,' in my personal experience as a mere amateur flyer, I couldn't agree more. Both main manufacturers and the airlines are leaning more and more towards a situation where the 'systems' hold sway and the pilots are virtually forbidden to fly manually, unless they take the risk of being charged with anything from 'gross negligence' to 'manslaughter' if anything goes wrong.......
It's worth bearing in mind, too, that the 'first duty' of flightcrews nowadays is 'listening to the systems.' Someone above mentioned that the AF447 pilots shouldn't have taken as much as ten seconds or so before reacting to the 'zoom-climb' - it's fair to say that, as far as I know, the flight-crew's first duty would have been to 'plough through' all the error messages, one by one, with the PNF reading them out and the PF acknowledging and clearing them, before they actually DID anything about them.......
Sadly, I suspect that when (and if) the BEA finally comes clean and publishes the full CVR transcript, we'll hear that the flightcrew literally didn't live long enough to get through 'tic-tacking' on all those messages.......
My own view is - and always has been - that the pilot should always have the final say. And, further, that if a given aeroplane can't be safely flown manually in all conditions, the answer is not to install yet more 'systems' but to
'design the b****y thing so that it works properly......'