It's always hilarious to see ignorant developers on HN claiming that real world engineering problems are easy to solve based on zero actual knowledge or experience. This kind of comment is really peak HN.

An autopilot for airplanes is only "easy" until something goes wrong. For example, one failure mode for autopilots is that if the aircraft gets progressively more and more out of trim the autopilot will automatically compensate until it hits its design limit. Then it suddenly disengages, leaving the human pilots in manual control of a nearly uncontrollable aircraft. If you talk to an actual flight control engineer they can give you plenty more examples of why building a safe autopilot is quite hard.

"Done" in what sense? Do you even understand how autopilots work and how limited they are?

That’s a nice strawman you’re creating there.

An aircraft has fewer and simpler variables to deal with than ground vehicle.

If a ground vehicle runs a red light, it’s potentially fatal error. There are more of these for a car than there are for an airplane.

You don’t have to write automation to avoid hitting trees in a plane. An airplane just needs terrain data and a few algorithms.

There are a few enough airplanes and airplane manufacturers that you could regulate a specific algorithm for traffic avoidance.

> There are more of these for a car than there are for an airplane.

Half of this comment section has strangely simplified ideas of how airplanes work and how a flight might get into trouble.

It's crazy that so many comments are convinced that completely automating airplane flight is some relatively trivial problem.

Those comments are coming from people whose aviation "knowledge" was learned by playing Ace Combat on Xbox and watching Snakes on a Plane. Totally disconnected from reality.

That's a nice strawman you're creating there. In some airspace classes and flight regimes an aircraft has more variables, especially when you account for possible failures. If an aircraft has a mechanical failure it can't just pull over and stop.

There are about 46000 aircraft registered in the USA, plus more that sometimes fly in from foreign countries. Many aircraft were manufactured decades ago by companies that no longer exist so major upgrades aren't economically practical.

So why did we have airplane autopilots decades before car autopilots if it's not easier?

"Easier" != "easy"

This is such a strange comment section.

Airplane autopilot is more like the cruise control feature in your car, not a self-driving computer that does everything for the pilots while they sit back.

Car autopilot and airplane autopilot don't share much in common other than the word "autopilot"

Modern auto pilot and flight management computer combos can fly way-points and perform full Cat III auto lands.

I’m not suggesting the pilots are sitting there doing fuck-all, or that they are not necessarily.

I think what the automate ATC advocates are suggesting is to bring ATC in to the 21st century.

Yes, and that's what the FAA NextGen program has been doing incrementally since 2003. There are probably ways to accelerate it but it seems like most of the "automate ATC advocates" are simply ignorant and haven't done their homework.

https://www.faa.gov/nextgen

Thanks for that link too. I wasn’t aware of the extent to which all those is already underway.

My knowledge is mostly limited to a casual watching of the aviation YouTube boffins.

Airplane autopilots are basically just cruise control.

You still have a human in the loop double checking everything constantly and stepping in as soon as something isn’t routine (which is actually quite frequently).

Commercial air travel has a passenger fatality on something like one in ten million flights [0], and less than that on newer aircraft.

Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles. [1]

So maybe you are technically correct. Barely. And it has nothing to do with airplanes being fast — planes only need to go a few tens of miles per trip to be significantly safer than cars, and plane trips are a lot longer than that.

[0] https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm

[1] https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...

All I'm saying is: if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, the drive to the airport wasn't more dangerous than your flight on the plane.

This is intuitive and obvious and yet is somehow beaten out of us by "quick facts" that we accept blindly touting commercial aviation as some kind of miracle. It's still a miracle but not quite to the degree that people believe. Hurtling through the sky at 0.8 Mach in a metal tube will always be more dangerous than rolling down a highway in a metal cage at 70 mph.

None of the people who responded to me yet have refuted this.

> Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles.

Which is vanishingly small.

It means the average driver can expect to be a fatality in an automobile accident once ever one to two hundred years or more.

If you drive a fairly typical 12.5K miles per year, it will take you 8000 years to drive 100M miles.

“Or more” technically includes a factor of 20-80x, but I think you were way low.

Thanks. Sloppy work.

I’m half an Australia away from my usual internet-rant tooling, and I find multi-tab cross referencing on mobile pretty unenjoyable.

From https://usafacts.org/articles/is-flying-safer-than-driving/

> In 2022, the fatality rate for people traveling by air was .003 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. The death rate people in passenger cars and trucks on US highways was 0.57 per 100 million miles.

Planes travel about 10x-20x faster than cars, but that’s still 0.06 vs 0.57. Seems like quite a difference. Which numbers are you using?

Is the purpose of travel to go from one place to another or to spend time?

If it’s to go from one place to another, referencing statistics to per-mile seems to make more sense and, to me, it’s in no way “cheating because planes travel so fast”.

But your choice of destination changes because air travel is available to you. You wouldn't go to a destination thousands of miles away, as often, if it weren't possible to fly there.