In the FMC and Autopilot software the way out of those nP problem areas has been for those systems to failover to the human pilot handing them the bag-of-bolts and expecting them to recover the situation that the automation could not.
I’m glad I’m not the only one to think that way. You could also add: “While overloading the $%^@ out them with aural/visual/tactile warnings that may be in error or inappropriate.”
A few tens of billions of transistors ridden by a million lines of code have thrown in the towel in the hope that a suited monkey with 85 billion neurons and 15 trillion synapses can do better... Unfortunately, a lot of mine are being used to tell the difference between various sorts of libation and to track attractive females. Not to mention run away from scary animals with big teeth.
Moving on, what separates the “old school” pilot from the “new” one in terms of their ability to recover from (or not even approach) UA/upsets? Did the previous generation of airframes flip on their backs every-now-and then to keep you in practice? Did people hand-fly 10hr sectors? Was there more UA/upset training? Or do some of today’s aircraft have a level of complexity in non-normal situations that would give Chuck Yeager difficulties unless he’d spent a few weeks with the FCOM in the sim? I’m not sure, hence all the “?”
Having automation that is very “modal” is OK up to a point but having modes that are hardly ever seen in real life and rarely practiced with causes problems to neural networks (that’s us) that have optimised their topography to deal with the input they get 99.99% of the time. If you want to know what that feels like, just try driving a car with your left foot on the accelerator and your right foot on the brake: it works while you are
consciously controlling your muscles but as soon as your focus of attention turns elsewhere, say an obstacle suddenly appearing in front of you, it all goes wrong. Same as on of those trick bikes where the handlebar steering is reversed. You can’t retrain to proficiency by swapping over “LEFT” and “RIGHT” and issuing a notice to bike riders that this is now the case. Aircraft manufacturers and operators seem to think you can do just that...