The original post is about interview questions.
You've concocted quite the once-in-a-career, once-in-a-lifetime situation as a retort. I doubt any interviewer would sit across from you at the table and say this:
"Your wife and child have been seriously injured in an accident, and your mission is to fly them to the hospital in our airplane, which you've just found to have an inoperative nav light. What are you gonna do?"
Now if they did say that, well then that tells me a bit about how they want to make their interview. Which is why I doubt that would ever be asked.
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What you call
a bunch of freaking robots, many call standardization.
The rules are to be followed.
At what point does one gain the privilege of being able to waive rules on their own in order to fly a plane? I am not talking about the once in a billion situation you've given, where you need to fly your own dying wife and kid to a hospital without a light bulb. I'm talking about real, day to day operations where people are relying on the pilot of their airplane to make decisions based on what the regulations allow.
If the pilot can disregard a regulation that says certain equipment is required, what else can they disregard? Do they not really have to have that tachometer fixed if the patient is in bad shape and needs to go now? Does the frost on the wing not have to melt the rest of the way because a heart is in a cooler on the ramp and an operating room is waiting?
The whole purpose of hiring a pilot is to know they are going to do the job and do it properly.
If you think someone is a robot, they are probably following the rules as they should be.
Any decent air ambulance company would never put the pilot in a position where they would have to watch a patient in critical condition be delayed by a light bulb. The company would have realized that being in the business of life or death response time, they need to have a plan for when things break that do not effect the airplanes's ability to fly.
Like a road ambulance driver carrying a cell phone to call another ambulence if his gets a flat tire.
Anything less would be amateur.
