It's thinking skills that count, more than flying skills
OK I am not a pilot. John Farley was chief test pilot on the Harrier and knows a thing or two about aviation and automation. I'll quote something he wrote in Flight Magazine about the Hudson ditching.
He said that the failure of both engines in a place from which a runway could not be reached is beyond any plausible capability of an automatic pilot to decide what to do next. But a human, keeping his cool, could decide to instruct the system to land on the river, and once instructed, the system could in principle carry out this difficult task better than most humans would do it.