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by caf 975 days ago
Really they both estimate, but the vehicle tends to have smaller error bars on its estimates. Which still goes to your point.
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Humans are terrible at high velocity estimates. That's one of the conditions described in the accident investigation report for that Irish plane which smashed a bunch of runway lighting due to insufficient take off power.

A brand new top of the line passenger jet would say e.g. "Caution: Acceleration" because it can work out the velocity of the plane, from there the acceleration and the remaining runway length (it uses GPS to identify the runway it's on) and take off speed and conclude we won't make it. Humans only decide that after it's far too late. Because it's much earlier the annunciation allows pilots to abort takeoff and investigate from the safety of the ground - in the Irish case they'd typed the wrong air temperature in and thus the engine performance was much worse than expected, with the right air temp it would have flown just fine