4 ms·
Airline passengers don't generally care about it being safer on average. If the autopilot can't make a landing in a 30 kt crosswind all of the time people won't
by mveety 9y ago
Airline passengers don't generally care about it being safer on average. If the autopilot can't make a landing in a 30 kt crosswind all of the time people won't fly on that plane. People have much higher standards for acceptable safety with aircraft than cars. Also, autopilot isn't really designed to replace the pilot. Its designed to reduce workloads during departure and approach and make cruise less shitty. Autopilots are entirely unable to handle even simple failures and even in many cases do simple things like climb at a specific airspeed or do wind drift corrections. Car are just much simpler, have fewer consequences, and have lower expectations of safety. Until we get more versatile autopilots, aircrew acceptance, and/or lower expectations of safety, I don't see self-flying airliners anytime soon.