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Comment by Upvoter33 | Hacker News Reader

I thought most of plane take off, flight, and landing were automated long ago... ?

[sorry, should have done more googling: https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-a-plane-land-automatica... seems to say auto-land is there (but used very little) and no auto-takeoff]

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There are other people talking about autoland, but it's actually meant to line the aircraft up with the runway and gently glide it down, and then the pilot deactivates it around 200-300ft off the ground to flare. It's not meant to perform the entire landing sequence autonomously. Autoland doesn't flare by itself, so while it can safely land the aircraft, it will cause a ton of stress on the landing gear that adds up to more frequent downtime for repairs.

Now that's just completely wrong. Airliners had full automatic landing capability for a long time, it's very often used when there's zero visibility at the destination airport.

Yep, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system

It does require hardware on the runway though.

This is for landing without visual contact with the runway (i.e. instrument flight conditions), typically the pilot is still controlling the aircraft, and looking at an instrument that tells him/her how to adjust the controls, although many aircraft can land automatically using these same systems.

I believe the A320 has some auto land capability. Not a pilot, so don't know the details, but based on Youtube, it appears the pilot has to do some configuration on approach (line up the plane to some extent, set engines appropriately, etc).

It has been, but there is still a strong incentive to have a human in semi-control for contingencies

Not only that, but it's free training. This helps keep pilots sharp and current.

If autoland fails it could be that there's something else going wrong with the aircraft(ranging from a faulty sensor to something more serious). Now you have a pilot with degraded proficiency trying to land in an unusual condition. This impairs safety.

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