> Do you smell smoke coming from the vents?
This is not the most common way to detect a fire in an aircraft (unless GA). The most common way is "FIRE" being indicated in the annunciator panel.
> Pilots have to learn the schematics of electrical wiring behind the dashboards.
No they are definitely do not. They will only know the wiring if they are also mechanics.
They need to know which fuses control what, but that's a much higher level.
> They are expected to do problem-solving in case of malfunction
Also no. The first thing to be done is triggering the memory items. Those are memorized. Zero thought here. Pilots have to (and generally will) fall back to what they have been instructed to do.
Next there's the checklists. They will execute the checklists line item by line item. No thinking happens here either, nor it is supposed to.
If all those fail... usually you'll read the resolution in some NTSB report.
> The first time asymetric thrust was used to pilot a plane (ailerons and elevators didn’t work), it was done without being in the books
Not sure if that was the first time, maybe first time in an _airliner_. Also in that particular incident, they had an experience commander, first officer and an instructor for that specific model of aircraft working together (the instructor was handling the thrust levers).
That was also a very extraordinary incident.
> flight crew performance was highly commendable and greatly exceeded reasonable expectations
> I wonder how this can work with computers
During the Columbia incident, the computers didn't know the wing was melting. But they detected a deviation from the flight path, which they tried to correct with control surfaces. When that failed, they added RCS thrusters too. The 'wing melting condition' wasn't programmed, but still they managed to use all available resources.
For more on how we could allow craft to 'intelligently' respond to failures, take a look at the Remote Agent, from NASA's DS-1 mission.