• SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today
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    6 days ago

    Pilot here.
    There’s already a huge amount of automation available for airplanes large and small. The current top of the line will allow the airplane to connect every phase of flight except for the takeoff, coming all the way down to landing on the runway. In your average airline flight, probably 80 to 95% of the flight is flown by computer. The pilots are managing the aircraft, talking to ATC, etc. So you could argue that that is already there.

    If you mean the ability to conduct a trip without an operator, IE little girl jumps in the back of the car and says ‘Tessie take me to school!’ and the car drives her to school, that will absolutely happen in cars before airplanes. The simple reason is edge cases and emergencies. In a car, if something goes wrong, you simply pull over. Or, worst case scenario, just slow down and stop. It’s not great but it’s not terrible. If something goes wrong in an airplane, you need to keep operating the airplane for anywhere between 10 minutes and 4 hours including a landing. A lot of what pilots do in emergencies is figure out exactly how their airplane has been damaged and strategize around that. A lot of that is intuition, the rest is deduction based on understanding of how the airplane works. Since the computer can’t see out the window or feel things like buffets and sound, a computer won’t necessarily be as good at that. So the pilots aren’t going anywhere.