[greenyoda]

I'm pretty sure that it will be a long time before we have technology that can land a plane safely in the Hudson River after it loses all power due to multiple bird collisions.

And we'd need to be able to do this even for a cargo plane with no passengers on board, since a disabled plane crashing into a populated area would cause a lot of deaths.

[marshallp]

That's what people said about driving cars as well. until a serious effort showed it was possible.

[potatolicious]

Airplanes are substantially more complicated machines than cars, and are also pushed much further in their performance envelope than cars.

Cars also enjoy much safer failure modes than aircraft - if a catastrophic failure occurs in all likelihood you can pull the car over to a stop without issue. When a catastrophic failure occurs in an aircraft's controls it hits the ground and everybody dies.

We're not even quite there yet for self-driving cars, though we are close - and that is a problem orders of magnitude easier than fully-competent autopilots.

We already have the technology to take off, fly, and land planes in the Happy Case. But the devil is really in the unhappy cases.

Nobody is saying we won't ever have full autopilots - but that we are very, very far away from such a capability, and simply throwing engineers at the problem is unlikely to give you the solution substantially faster. When you're pushing the absolute edges of scientific and engineering knowledge progress does not correlate strongly with workforce.

[fr0sty]

The big difference between cars and planes is that a near universal failsafe in a car is to slam on the brakes. Car stops. Simple and relatively foolproof. There is no such avenue available to a plane in flight.

If you still think it's possible take some time to learn of all the novel failure modes that have occured over the past few decades in commercial aviation. Pay special attention to the ones requiring crew to override onboard computers.