Things go wrong all the time. That is why experienced navigators and aviators are crucial.
“How about letting experienced pilots fly their planes instead of having some pimply faced know it all software “genius” do it for them?”
YES! The Asiana Air Lines crash at San Francisco brought to light the fact that Asian Culture was partially the cause. The new pilots don’t really know how to fly their planes when faced with inoperative electronics. I read a piece by a retired American pilot who was fired from both of the Korean airlines because he was failing some of their in-training pilots. The other thing is that their log books are really bull$hit. They log ten hour flights from the US to Asia when, in reality, the planes fly themselves for more than nine hours of each crossing. So they show up in SF to land and the CAT III ILS is inoperative and they can’t get their plane established on a proper glide slope without the navaid. The pictures of their vertical decent and airspeed on approach showed that these “pilots” really didn’t know how to fly by reference to basic instruments. I would NEVER fly a foreign flag airline knowing that their pilots are more like video game participants.