"You don't have to do anything, the plane will fly itself. Unless there's a catastrophic emergency. Then you better remember everything you haven't practiced from 18 months ago" seems like a failed implementation.
There's a checklist procedure for almost any scenario they will run into (of course not every). This exact issue was seen by other airlines and the pilots followed the checklist procedures to safely regain control of the plane as expected.
In theory, these checklists are optimized to resolve these issues and regain control as quickly as possible while ruling out other causes. It is very rare the correct course of action for the pilot differs from the checklist procedure.
There is 0 expectation that the pilot should remember everything. Pilots are trained specifically to communicate with each other to go through these checklists as quickly as possible.
That being said, there is a major concern that this issue will popup while taking off and being too low to the ground to properly follow procedure in time to recover control of the aircraft.
Apparently, the plane thought all was well, just needed to point the nose of the plane down a wee bit.
Reviewing the video below - it appears to still line up with this. He doesn't mention the actual memory items changing. His explanation is the pilots starting using the wrong memory items because of information overload.
Example - They could have been going through the stall memory items instead of the runaway vertical stabilizer memory items.
(Air Traffic increased ten-fold since 1970, while fatalities went from 3,500 pa to a few hundred)
When a typical civilian passenger plane throws everything up and yields control to its pilot, the pilot gets 10+ minutes to fix it, helped by a copilot, mountains of checklists and a direct audio line to air traffic control.
Nothing to do with the 5s you maybe get when your Tesla yields.
