Deferred, Im going to assume for a moment that you have many thousands of hours of experience, and more to the point a good deal of that time on the 777.
As we are talking about unreliable airspeed 'in the cruise" I'm curious to your rational that blindly adopting a pitch attitude and power setting without considering your situation is a sensible course of action..it is in fact on the basis of what your experience may be, troubling to me at the very least.
Deferred if you are genuinely advocating this, then I'd suggest a quick review of your Boeing QRH checklist instructions..contained within.
While every attempt is made to supply needed non–normal checklists, it is not possible to develop checklists for all conceivable situations. In some smoke, fire, or fumes situations, the flight crew may need to move between the Smoke, Fire or Fumes checklist and the Smoke or Fumes Removal checklist
Seems to me that based on the document Boeing produces...they themselves provide some common sense guidance in this regard and even give an example to reiterate the point I believe.
Lets now assume for a moment you or your colleague aren't conscientious nor is your SA great and you find yourself close to max FMC alt when you encounter the top of a CB (at night..doesn't it always happen at night!) thanks to low radar reflectivity etc etc..and hey presto you get the stick shaker and the overspeed....are you going to reduce thrust to 70% and pitch up to 4 degrees? how long till you stall the aeroplane aerodynamically? how long till you overspeed it? how long till the other guy is useful again and gets past that startle effect?
I KNOW that 85% N1 and 2.5 degrees is safe in the cruise...and will keep me safe.
Don't believe that I'm not using a bit of common sense and experience to add resilience to the Boeing memory items and checklist?...then lets look past the memory items...and understand where the rest of the checklist leads you.
5 Chooseone:
Aircraft can be trimmed to desired pitch attitude:
Go to step 6
Aircraft cannot be trimmed to desired pitch
attitude:
PRIMARY FLIGHT COMPUTERS disconnectswitch.............. DISC
Go to step 6
6 The following are reliable:
Attitude
N1
Ground speed Radio altitude
So there we have it...Pitch and N1 are reliable! who'd have thought it?
moving on...
Note: Stick shaker, overspeed warning, and AIRSPEED LOW alerts may sound erroneously or simultaneously.
Note: The flight path vector, and pitch limit indicator are unreliable.
7
Refer to the Flight with Unreliable Airspeed table in the Performance Inflight chapter and set the pitch attitude and thrust setting for the current airplane configuration and phase of flight.
And we get get to the meaty bit...because we've ALREADY established a safe pitch and power setting for the current phase of flight, it gives us more time to make a better assessment of the issue thanks to the aircraft never entering an undesired state.
Now we have time to complete the checklist having overcome that startle effect and dealt with the fear factor, after all its an aeroplane and basic physics apply, Attitude, Power, Trim.....just like a C150.
The intent of checklists and memory items are to AID to the pilot, they are and were never intended to replace your thought and reasoning process.
Lastly, failing all of that merely take a quick mental note of your steady state N1 and Attitude when it settles down in the cruise...you'd be amazed how that works.
Now if we are discussing unreliable airspeed in the climb or descent...thats another topic for discussion, and much more related and in tune to the checklist memory items for N1 and Attitude.