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I've been thinking about your question. Are there no safe planes?
Many people point to fact elevators became so automated that they eliminated the elevator operator, so it's only a matter of time until they eliminate pilots.
This contains a fundamental misunderstanding. When the automation or mechanical devices fail in an elevator, the elevator comes to a stop and the occupants wait for the Fire Department to come rescue them.
We already have driver-less buses, and likewise when they fail, they come to a complete stop and open the doors.
Automation has made commercial aircraft really easy to fly when everything is working right. But when something fails, an aircraft doesn't simply hover in the sky waiting for rescuers.
When something fails in an aircraft you quickly find out whether the people flying your aircraft are really actual pilots, or are merely poorly trained automation attendants.
One of the complaints of the pilot's union is Airbus and Boeing have oversold their automation, giving the impression that automated aircraft can be piloted by those with less experience. And indeed they can be, until something goes wrong, like the ILS system is temporarily out of order at the airport they're landing at. Then they actually have to fly the aircraft themselves.
Commercial pilots around the world were scandalized to learn that the Captain of the Ethiopian Airline had only 200 hours of total simulator and flying experience. In the US pilots need 1,500 hours of simulator experience in their particular type of aircraft to be able to act as co-pilot. Internationally pilots can work for flight schools for 200 hours and acquire their license to fly a multi-engine aircraft with an instrument rating. At that point they have a frozen license, and can't be a pilot on most airlines until they have 1,500 hours flying air cargo or at low-cost carriers like Ryan Air which accepts pilots with lesser experience - and you should wonder why you would ever fly on that airline.
There's an exception allowing 200 hours of simulator experience for experienced fighter jet pilots. In the history of commercial aviation when a pilot has saved an aircraft with a serious parts failure or damage, they're almost always a former fighter pilot. They know their plane and they know what sort of unconventional maneuvers can get them safely back on the ground.
If these automated Trim Wheels controlling the tail trim aren't doing what you want them to do for any reason, it's pretty obvious you need to switch-off the electric motors driving them and operate them by hand. If you're going too fast to turn the trim wheels by hand, you need to deploy the air brake right next to to the trim wheels, to slow the aircraft enough that you can turn them. A real pilot could easily do that.
The 200 hours experienced Ethiopian pilot turned off the electric motors turning these trim wheels to put the plane into a downward slope, but then turned them back on. With only 200 hours simulator experience, he wasn't really a pilot, he should have been driving a bus or a flying a cargo plane, not a plane full of people. Does an Airbus fly-by-wire which reboots all three flight computers leaving the pilots with blank screens make recovering from a system failure easier or harder? On the Air France with blank screens, even experienced pilots lost track of what was happening and how they needed to respond. They could have recovered if they'd been following their flight more closely rather than chatting, confident the computers would fly the plane.
These controls have reduced accidents by 96%, but they still fail. China has made a bold decision to build their jet with 38 year old controls systems to avoid using patented equipment. We'll see of their accident rate is like the 1960s, or magically like the low accident rate of today's modern jets. Quite a bold experiment.
