My next door neighbor is a flight instructor for American. I’ll ask him about the lack of stick time. He says planes are so safe now that in flight problems are extremely rare.
He also says most of his instruction is done on simulators, not in planes.
American has recognized the disparity between stick time and flight hours, and according to a pilot I had a conversation with a few weeks ago, have begun to push up the simulator time requirements.
Your friend is absolutely correct — flying is MUCH safer than it was, and this is due to the computerization of the planes. Pilot error — a leading cause of most accidents — has all but vanished in U.S.-based carriers, except in the most extreme circumstances. And more and more, these circumstances are a disconnect between what the computer is doing and what the pilot is doing. The pilots on the Air France flight were so preoccupied with troubleshooting the aircraft’s computer that they literally forgot to (or didn’t) fly the plane. The action they should have taken was fairly simple: Set the AoA and the thrust to correct parameters, then spend time figuring out what happened.
Lastly, simulator time is good, but it does remove the “Oh sh*t” factor. Pilots react vastly different when they are in the air than in a building. How you would train for this in the air, though, is difficult.