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by kllrnohj 1594 days ago
Does autopilot make sense? Aviation autopilot seems to be many orders of magnitude more reliable than Tesla's autopilot.

In fact, autopilot in aviation contexts is regularly used when human pilots are worse, such as landing at airports that regularly experience fog & low visibility conditions. As in, autopilot is the fallback for humans, not the other way around.

Heck, aviation autopilot is now available for use in emergency landings ( https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/garmin-autoland-wins-202... ).

Compared to Tesla autopilot, these are seemingly two vastly unrelated situations.

1 comments

Surely autopilot is an easier problem to solve compared to self-driving cars? Air traffic is controlled, road traffic is chaotic. Aerial vehicles move through what's essentially empty space with pretty much no obstacles, cars must navigate imperfect always changing urban mazes full of people whose actions are unpredictable.
And there is land infrastructure in place for autolanding, aiming localization etc.. Much different from roads.