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It is so, so much easier to have a computer land a plane than to travel through a road infrastructure made for humans. There are no roads, no obstacles, usuall
by anyfoo 6y ago
It is so, so much easier to have a computer land a plane than to travel through a road infrastructure made for humans.
There are no roads, no obstacles, usually not even other planes constraining your plane for any autopilot situation. With autolanding, "other planes" might start becoming an issue, but it's still a vastly different level from the momentary and immediate coordination necessary between cars on public roadways.
- bumby 6y agoAlso, the operating environment is rather stable for aircraft. You won’t find thing’s like construction cones blocking off airspace that was once available. Even if airspace availability was changed, its not likely to create an immediate hazard (with some caveats like military testing ranges)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bombcar 6y agoAutoland is impressive but it really is more equivalent to a system (in a car) that automatically applies the brakes than to a full self driving system. Autopilot is simple and a solved problem. Self driving is not either.
- anyfoo 6y agoGarmin Autoland is much more than "apply the brakes", as I understand. But it's still guiding your plane through an essentially empty environment, not something in the same ballpark as autonomous driving.
- sudosysgen 6y agoWell, more or less, the "apply the brakes" system still has to detect obstacles and calculate the optimal way to brake and so on. So it has to deal with dynamic environmenrs. Autoland, not so much.
- seoaeu 6y agoI'd very much not want to be in an airplane whose landing strategy was "automatically apply the brakes". Navigating to an airport, lining up with the runway, and gently bringing down the plane seems significantly harder than auto-breaking.