There's a lot of open space available, but transportation doesn't evenly distribute itself among the available space. There will be clustering points because pe

There's a lot of open space available, but transportation doesn't evenly distribute itself among the available space. There will be clustering points because people want to go the same places or use the same thoroughfares, and those areas will have higher risks of collisions. Before the 60s, collisions were rare per mile traveled, but a roughly yearly occurrence across major commercial airlines. It took a lot of policy and engineering work to reduce their frequency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-air_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-air_collision Automated systems might be able to fix this? They wouldn't have to deal with the paper bag problem, just avoiding every obstacle, so that's a plus. But sudden braking isn't the near universal solution or mitigation that it is with driving, and predicting the movement of other airborne objects is really hard, so those are minuses. Beyond collision prevention, there's an interesting general question in this thread about whether automated flying or automated driving is a more difficult engineering problem. I can see arguments for both sides, would love to hear a really thorough analysis, preferably by someone who has worked on either or both problems.