> While lifeguards are taught all the possible signs of a person who is drowning, pilots don’t receive elaborate training on all the things that can go wrong, precisely because the many things that can go wrong so rarely do.
In fact, pilots are given extensive training in the failure modes of their airplanes. When Casner got his private pilot license, he should have been told to memorize the emergency procedures for his airplane. De novo private pilots are not given the same level of training as airplane pilots, but failure modes and "interesting-looking instrument panels" are crucial components of instrument training.
More generally, I don't disagree with his conclusions regarding the problems with cockpit automation, but they are hardly novel - the industry has been aware of this for years. However, the service life of an airliner is measured in decades, and the regulatory environment, for excellent reasons, doesn't allow us to change the avionics on existing airliners without re-certifying the new systems and re-training all the pilots.
Last but not least, I'd like to point out that even if the airplane is on autopilot, there is still plenty for the pilots to do. For example, they are supposed to brief the instrument approach procedure and the missed approach procedure every single time they fly it. A lot of pilots relax this discipline (if you've flown into the same airport hundreds of times, it's hard to argue that re-reading the procedure yet again has much value). But relaxing it to the point of just idly chatting all the way down the glideslope? That's not a problem with the cockpit systems, and it's hard to see how better human factors would have magically turned these incredibly irresponsible people into good pilots.