Air Rabbit, thanks for your comprehensive reply.
Apologies for leading you to think I might have been believing that your comments are either “off the mark,” “irrelevant,” “overly simplistic,” or a combination, perhaps all, of the above. I meant no such thing, and was taking them at face value.
My interest lay in my perception that now many of the old causes of airliner accidents have been largely eradicated by technology, what is left is a much lower incidence of diverse ways of human failing. (By contrast, in my world of gliding, our major fatal and serious accident causes – at least in the UK – are much the same from one year to another, because we keep doing the same things the same way, and rarely see significant improvements in technology or human behaviour. One notable exception was a big reduction in the last few years in launch-failure-related stall/spin accidents, following a big effort in training including post solo recurrent training. But all too often I have seen evidence of the pilot either acting wrongly when faced with a problem he/she recognised, or failing to evaluate correctly a problem and becoming fixated on the wrong solution. It seemed to me that the AF447 FO did that too.)
I wish I knew how to improve the human weak link – in my world and yours. I have a perception that good test pilots coolly, calmly and methodically evaluate situations and mostly come out with a good outcome. I don’t suggest that all pilots are put through test pilot training, and anyway I think they are selected from the best of the best. Many/most professional pilots are selected as the best of the rest. We ordinary mortals at the bottom of the aviation pyramid of abilities are least equipped to do well in unusual circumstances – the evidence is that all too many fail at the expected events, let alone at the unusual.
So, my genuinely intended question was about whether some form of training can help pilots cope better with very unusual, even unique, events.
(By the way, I am no paragon of virtue – I have had accidents, thankfully without injury, by departing from practices I was trained in. I have also experienced an unusual, and not trained for, event – some form of turbulence which led me to think at first that the glider had developed a mechanical fault – which I did not know how best to handle.)