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Comment by fleitz | Hacker News Reader

There's lots of autopilot systems that smash into shit, sailboats are one of them, you can put your sailboat on autopilot and it's going to smash into stuff.

Samething with an airliner, autopilot will not avoid another aircraft.

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> Samething with an airliner, autopilot will not avoid another aircraft.

Wrong! There are autopilots which integrate TCAS into the autopilot (A380 among them).

Source: http://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-releases/en/2009/08/eas...

They exist. But collision avoidance is far from a necessary retirement. E.g. my father in law's private single engine. Autopilot is basically cruise control, but you know...for a pilot

There’s Autothrottle, which is more like cruise control. Autopilot controls attitude aka steering.

Tesla Autopilot is a combination of both steering and throttle control.

True. The point remains though...collision avoidance is not a requirement for autopilot in the context of planes (or boats)

GP didn’t say “not a requirement”, the poster said “will not avoid”, which is factually incorrect.

TCAS in a plane is like Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) in a car. It's active 100% of the time in cars, not just when you're using super-cruise-control or other automation.

Of course TCAS is always enabled while in flight and is technically unrelated to autopilot. That doesn’t negate the point that many Airbus planes will automatically follow RAs when on autopilot if that is enabled by the flight crew.

Airliners have Air Traffic Control to route them, removing all but the rarest of edge cases for "smashing into stuff".

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