“I am an airline captain, and I train airline pilots. You are woefully ignorant.”
I know nothing about what happened so I am not speculating on what may or may not have happened.
I would like to hear from you about how the newer technology planes operate and manual procedures by pilots which over ride these systems.
Fourth generation airliners are first and foremost airplanes. Most of these breathless articles make it sound like these airplanes fly themselves. They don’t. In most regards, pilots flying a fourth generation airliner take the same basic steps to go from point A to point B as an early DC-9 (I’ve flown them all, first gen to fourth gen).
You flight prep at the gate in both. You taxi to a runway the same way. You take off the same way. You turn on an autopilot the same way (and the same place). You land the same way.
The differences are in the tools used to do the same tasks. In today’s airliner the preflight prep at the gate is extremely time intensive. There is no “kick the tires, light the fires” attitude. That intensive programming then transfers tasks that previously were done enroute, namely navigation, to on the ground, at the gate. It makes sense: move some tasks to a less critical phases of flight.
Bottom line: a pilot is intimately involved THROUGHOUT a flight, in new and old airliners. The automation permits the pilots to transfer tasks to less critical phases of flight, thereby freeing them up for the most important task: monitoring.