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We don't have self-piloting planes which routinely take off, fly a route, and land. Setting an autopilot for a route is relatively trivial. Auto-landing in hea
by TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
We don't have self-piloting planes which routinely take off, fly a route, and land.
Setting an autopilot for a route is relatively trivial. Auto-landing in heavy crosswinds or landing on water because of an emergency isn't.
- cameronh90 4y agoNot take off, but we do have many planes which routinely fly a route and land. It depends on the airline and route, but some airlines now have changed their standard company procedure to engage autopilot as soon as you're about 400ft off the ground all the way through to autoland. Some airlines only use autoland when the landing is too difficult for the pilot due to poor visibility (though as you say, high crosswinds usually mean a manual landing). On top of that, autoland is very old technology - ILS is from the 30s and autoland not much later. We don't have automatic taxiing or take off in any common airplanes yet. This phase involves a lot of ATC back/forth so it doesn't really make sense at the moment, but there are some changes coming to ATC and transponders which might make this more feasible in the medium term.