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by seanmcdirmid 125 days ago
Autopilots in airplanes are kind of dumb (keep heading, speed, and altitude, they won’t do much anything else), which is why Tesla doesn’t use the name as branding for its full self driving software. People at least know that much.

But then again even on HN people like parent think that autopilot is the same as full self driving, when it is and always has been just smarter cruise control. The payout was for autopilot (a feature that most new cars have these days under various names), not full self driving.
2 comments
digitalPhonix 122 days ago
> Autopilots in airplanes are kind of dumb (keep heading, speed, and altitude, they won’t do much anything else)

That is absolutely false.

A 20 year old avionics suite in General Aviation (GTN 450) does much more than maintain altitude, speed & heading - you input a flight plan including an approach, it will fly the flight plan, capture the approach signals (VOR/localiser/whatever - which is far more complex than “keeping course”) all the way down to approach minimums.

It can go down to 200ft for an LPV approach.

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philistine 124 days ago
> keep heading, speed, and altitude, they won’t do much anything else

That is absolutely not true. A plane on autopilot can land itself except for applying the brakes.

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seanmcdirmid 124 days ago
Autolanders are separate systems from autopilots, and there are definitely planes in production today with autopilots (pretty universal) and no autolanders (like almost all Cessnas, you need the garmin auto land system, and it’s only for emergencies). Autopilots have been a thing since the 1920s, when they were just a rope tied to a stick, they definitely didn’t do auto landing back then.

If you are trying to claim that all autopilots come with auto landers, thats absolutely not true. Even most, and again, they are always separate systems even if the auto lander can access the same servos used by the autopilot. Additionally, autolanders, unlike the autopilot, require the runways to support it (well, the ones used on commercial airplanes where it’s used sometimes in low visibility situations).

I really think only a few people on HN don’t get that autopilots are actually very much simple systems that have been around forever and do one thing well (keep the plane going in one direction at a specific altitude and speed).

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