4 ms·
I think you are completely correct that what autopilot means in the public consciousness is much more than what it can actually do. The funny thing is that wha
by VBprogrammer 6y ago
I think you are completely correct that what autopilot means in the public consciousness is much more than what it can actually do.
The funny thing is that what an autopilot does in a real airplane is actually pretty close to what the Tesla autopilot does, if you set it to fly you into a mountain it will happily do so (abet with a lot of alarms going off in a modern airliner).
- falcolas 6y agoNot for decades now. Sure, a basic private aircraft wing-leveler or heading keeping system will fly you into a mountain, but the autopilots in passenger airlines can take off, fly a complete course, and land the plane. They're monitored by trained professionals with thousands of paid hours and hundreds of hours of training, of course.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoThat is precisely the misconception I was talking about. It's simply not true for modern airliners (outside of a few technical demonstrations). There was a Global businesses jet which had auto-takeoff but that's about the only one I know of in service. The reason it's not used is there are no limits on required takeoff visibility so there is no operational capibilities to be gained by auto-takeoff and you need to be able to see enough to taxi to the runway in any case. CAT-III autoland is a thing but it's actually only used in very limited circumstances, not least because it increases runway safety margins in a way which restricts runway utilisation. Many busy international airfields don't even have a CAT-III certified runway. The aircraft won't automatically cycle through to the correct mode to land (there are a bunch of other steps required to put then autopilot into a double/triple redundant mode etc).