A better example is QF10. Haven't heard of it? Well of course not, because looking from the outside, nothing happened. But, a couple of years ago it suffered a failure of the #1 side slip probe heat. The end result was that about a minute later, the autopilot(s) disconnected, flight directors all failed, auto thrust dropped out, and the aircraft reverted to alternate law II. Trimming is not available in the Airbus unless you're in direct law, and roll trim is never available, but it was also quite dramatically out of trim.
So, basically, all of the automatics dropped out..... Aircraft was manually flown to destination and landed normally.
Automatics fail ALL OF THE TIME. So, until things improve pretty massively, or we decide to accept airliners biting the dust with a lot more regularity than they do at the moment, we're a long way from the automatic airliner.
Actually, there will only ever be ONE crash of an automatic airliner...because after that who would get on board one.
The upshot is that things go wrong MUCH, MUCH more often than you might imagine. You only hear about it when we fail to make the problem go away. I, for one, will never set foot on an automatic airliner...though I will admit that if they continue to put minimally qualified pilots into aircraft you might be better off in one.
