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There are a lot of people in this thread putting down the idea of an autonomous plane, but frankly, as a pilot it is a much easier environment to automate than

There are a lot of people in this thread putting down the idea of an autonomous plane, but frankly, as a pilot it is a much easier environment to automate than driving. In the world of instrument flying there is very little to hit which isn't clearly charted, you have an external navigator to keep you clear of most other planes (Air Traffic Control), and the landing environment is kept very normalized by the hard work of the FAA. This is orders of magnitude simpler to pull off than self driving cars, and it might save the General Aviation industry.

p_l 7y ago
The problem is handling failures. We could do automatic landings back when the British introduced Autoland, and in fact any serious autonomous landing will use ILS as the backbone. The problem is that we barely got to the point where an autonomous plane was capable of reasoning enough to do a go-around, but I have zero belief that it would handle failures in other ways than "crash in unoccupied terrain" (if there's any).