I'd say that the confidence you talk of is created by practising;
You're correct, Bloggs. Badly expressed. Practicing in the sim to tick a box every 3 years is what I might have been alluding to. It's the type of scenario that is thrown in as a recurrency exercise; "you've seen it now, so let's move on." The true practicing I was referring to was a/c manipulation, by whatever means, on a day to day basis. That is how I learnt, not in the sim. The variety of captains going into a variety of destinations showed a variety/spectrum of skills and techniques from which I and every other F/O learnt our trade. And especially from the mistakes, both from them and myself. Minor ones, of course, so we can still talk about them. The culture of the companies was to have good sound trustworthy capable pilots who knew how and what to do with their a/c in the whole spectrum of circumstances. Nowadays it is every pilot flies exactly the same way as written in the bible of that company and when circumstances shift them out of their comfort zone of the written word they are left floundering.
Now, if I was an a/c manufacturer, or AAIB/NTSB investigator called in after a pilot induced incident, I would be asking more questions than perhaps is the modern trend; i.e.what happened to cause the accident? I would go much further and ask "Why did they do that? Why didn't they realise and do something different? How did they get themselves into that predicament and why did they not know how to extricate themselves?" As a manufacturer I would expect type rated pilots to be able to handle the a/c, understand its limits and capabilities, and know how to use all its systems in all circumstances. I would not expect my design to cause confusion thus adding to the woes, or even creating them. I would be concerned and confused how my wonder toy could have behaved in such an adolescent and rebellious manner. I might then discover that the SOP's were very restrictive and that the training was strict adherence to those SOP's, no discretion, and that the box within which crews operated and were educated was tiny compared to the possibilities and safe capabilities of my design. i.e. yes, strict adherence to SOP's would have prevented the scenario developing, but because of various circumstances they did indeed find themselves in rough waters, but with sound knowledge and ability they should have been able prevent further worsening of the situation and re-eastablished stable control of the a/c, as my design was intended to do. I would ask the question why that had not happened.