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Define ‘rare’... I remember reading plane autopilot ‘disengagements’ aren’t actually rare or uncommon but happen 1000s of times every day worldwide. Also, this

Define ‘rare’... I remember reading plane autopilot ‘disengagements’ aren’t actually rare or uncommon but happen 1000s of times every day worldwide. Also, this is completely ignoring that a) autopilot doesn’t work at all without lots of infrastructure on the ground (try landing on autopilot when the airport ILS is down or absent, for example), and b) there’s a non-trivial set of flight conditions in which autopilot cannot be used at all. People really should stop comparing plane autopilot to autonomous cars, the technologicalies share almost no similarities whatsoever. Plane autopilot doesn’t do any object recognition, AI, machine learning, adapting to the environment, etc. At the very best it will tell you when there’s another plane flying too close (based on an explicit location sent from the other plane or the ground), or when you almost run into the ground. That’s it. Everything else the autopilot does is just setting the flight controls to follow a preset path, and ensure the plane stays within the flight envelope.

notahacker 7y ago
> People really should stop comparing plane autopilot to autonomous cars Agreed, but it's Tesla doing that for marketing purposes that's the cause of these comparisons, not the people objecting to Tesla doing that for marketing purposes. Aircraft autopilot systems are relatively simple systems with a lot of instrument support and redundancy that relieve pilots of the need to hold a yoke in normal flight (with the latter bit being what the public tends to focus on). Tesla offers extremely complex software which makes more decisions based on less straightforward inputs and relies entirely on the driver holding the controls at all times in case it makes a bad decision.
close04 7y ago
I think a normal person’s interpretation of the “autopilot” term even when it comes to planes has nothing to do with the technicalities but rather an overview of what it can do: fly the plane for hours with little to no intervention. A plane never needs to avoid lane dividers though. And when the plane’s AP disengages, pilots have more than fractions of seconds to avoid a crash and possibly death. I think this is what people expect from AP now, because that’s how it’s marketed: to do the heavy lifting 90+% of the time and when it fails and disengages It should give plenty of time to react. Going forward AP will start to mean more and more “fully self driving”. Because that’s what some manufacturers claim it can do short of pesky legislation. So no supervision, no disengagement, just “piloting automatically”. And everyone pretty much has similar expectations from “automatically”.

notahacker 7y ago

> People really should stop comparing plane autopilot to autonomous cars Agreed, but it's Tesla doing that for marketing purposes that's the cause of these comparisons, not the people objecting to Tesla doing that for marketing purposes. Aircraft autopilot systems are relatively simple systems with a lot of instrument support and redundancy that relieve pilots of the need to hold a yoke in normal flight (with the latter bit being what the public tends to focus on). Tesla offers extremely complex software which makes more decisions based on less straightforward inputs and relies entirely on the driver holding the controls at all times in case it makes a bad decision.

close04 7y ago

I think a normal person’s interpretation of the “autopilot” term even when it comes to planes has nothing to do with the technicalities but rather an overview of what it can do: fly the plane for hours with little to no intervention. A plane never needs to avoid lane dividers though. And when the plane’s AP disengages, pilots have more than fractions of seconds to avoid a crash and possibly death. I think this is what people expect from AP now, because that’s how it’s marketed: to do the heavy lifting 90+% of the time and when it fails and disengages It should give plenty of time to react. Going forward AP will start to mean more and more “fully self driving”. Because that’s what some manufacturers claim it can do short of pesky legislation. So no supervision, no disengagement, just “piloting automatically”. And everyone pretty much has similar expectations from “automatically”.