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by annerajb 2996 days ago
I am curious how do aircraft pilots got around this? Autopilot on aircraft work same as a Tesla drive a straight line where I aimed you have way less interaction than on the car. Yet pilots are able to take over autopilot and their responsibility during it's use is mostly looking out the window and occasionally switching frequency
3 comments

There are two critical differences.

1: The handover latency (time from AP requesting handover to time pilot takes over) is measured in seconds to tens of seconds. AP is designed to give up a long time before any possible issues occur. Contrast this with cars on roads where the reaction times need to be in the sub-second range to avert crashes. If AP took a plane into terrain during poor visibility conditions and the pilots only got a second or two of terrain warning prior to a crash, such a crash would never be classified as pilot error on those grounds. Contrast this with self-driving cars where the autonomy frequently doesn't give up at all and the driver's awareness of the situation is the only thing to save them.

2: There are two operators on controls at all times. Recognising the limitations of human attention spans is one of but not the only reason for this being a requirement in civilian airlines.

Boeing has a whole design philosophy about making the operations of AP completely transparent to the pilots and failsafe. That means that all key controls (thrust, trim, stick, etc.) in the cockpit are physically manipulated by the AP so the pilots can see exactly what's going on. and more importantly that the controls represent the exact state of AP when the pilot takes over, so there are no unexpected sudden changes in input. The current generation of self-driving cars is a joke compared to the safety engineering that goes into AP systems.

One key difference is how much time operators have to figure out what's going on before action is necessary. If an aircraft autopilot fails, time before crash is likely measured in minutes, so the pilot taking 10 seconds to snap back into pilot mode still gives a pretty good likelihood of a favorable outcome. In a car, 10 seconds of no or bad driving on the part of the autopilot is pretty likely to cause a collision.

Even so, it's been implicated in crashes, notably Air France 447.

I think the big differences are that:

* pilots have thousands of hours of training/practice

* there are 2 of them

* there is a lot less traffic in the sky / not making a turn every km