obviously, your statement about needing humans to recover the situation is problematic.
The examples I cite are the tip of the iceberg. Regardless of whether an adverse situation develops because of human error, or some uncontrollable external event, the fact is that "today", the only way out is to have a skilled professional on hand to deal with things. But this is only half the debate. There is also a problem with "pilot-error" accidents and it is this that has so obviously confused Mr. Ridley.
There is a folder full of incidents that I could quote from where a fully serviceable aircraft, in benign weather, has been destroyed or come close to a serious accident simply because the pilots demonstrated that they couldn't fly even close to the level of proficiency demanded by their licence.
Neural networks have not arrived, nor do we yet have a truly AI-capable robot that improvises better than its human counterpart (not saying that it won't happen, btw). So, instead of asking “how can we get rid of the fallible pilot?”, the question should be "what can WE change to make the existing generation of pilots better at piloting?"
There is an elephant in the room and it won't go away just by removing pilots from aeroplanes.