Yes I agree.. As long as the system can simulate the degraded plane, and is fast enough, it can brute force through a huge number of decision trees and scenarios in milliseconds to find the optimal. A human would do something similar but will prune the tree much more heavily than the computer as the human is slow. This is analogous to any chess engine, the difference is that the plane flight requires a much more difficult simulation scenario compared to a chess board. The system has to understand or at least measure what has degraded as well which might be difficult.

(I don't mean to make it sound as I think it's easy to solve, but the basic strategy to solving it is simple :)