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Correct, but that’s with a perfectly functioning aircraft. The problems come when you have engines out, landing gear issues, or malfunctioning equipment. Look

Correct, but that’s with a perfectly functioning aircraft. The problems come when you have engines out, landing gear issues, or malfunctioning equipment. Look at the recent Waymo accidents. Two Waymo vehicles ran into a vehicle being towed backwards. An edge case that a human could have easily avoided, but software couldn’t.

mschuster91 3y ago
> Look at the recent Waymo accidents. Two Waymo vehicles ran into a vehicle being towed backwards. An edge case that a human could have easily avoided, but software couldn’t. The complexity of flying an airplane autonomously is way lower than for a car. The biggest reduction comes from there being (almost) no morons in airspace. Planes are expensive, pilot school is expensive, so the chance of encountering someone doing something they're not supposed to do is way lower - in a car, you have to deal with anything from random little children jumping onto the streets over drunk/tired/phone-using drivers to construction sites. Then there is the requirement of planes to carry ADS-B transmitters in many airspace classes, so planes precisely know where they are and where everyone else is. And distance between planes is also way larger, which makes avoidance easier. Basically, as long as the aircraft itself is working fine, everything from takeoff to landing can be done autonomously - and appropriate systems have been developed and used for decades, the first CAT 3 autoland capable aircraft arrived in the late 60s [1]. The only two unsolved challenges are taxiing and in-flight equipment failure... the former can be solved by having a tug pick up a plane on the runway, it's only the failure cases that are a real headache because, at least for now, that requires having highly trained pilots on board. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland

mschuster91 3y ago

> Look at the recent Waymo accidents. Two Waymo vehicles ran into a vehicle being towed backwards. An edge case that a human could have easily avoided, but software couldn’t. The complexity of flying an airplane autonomously is way lower than for a car. The biggest reduction comes from there being (almost) no morons in airspace. Planes are expensive, pilot school is expensive, so the chance of encountering someone doing something they're not supposed to do is way lower - in a car, you have to deal with anything from random little children jumping onto the streets over drunk/tired/phone-using drivers to construction sites. Then there is the requirement of planes to carry ADS-B transmitters in many airspace classes, so planes precisely know where they are and where everyone else is. And distance between planes is also way larger, which makes avoidance easier. Basically, as long as the aircraft itself is working fine, everything from takeoff to landing can be done autonomously - and appropriate systems have been developed and used for decades, the first CAT 3 autoland capable aircraft arrived in the late 60s [1]. The only two unsolved challenges are taxiing and in-flight equipment failure... the former can be solved by having a tug pick up a plane on the runway, it's only the failure cases that are a real headache because, at least for now, that requires having highly trained pilots on board. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland