Airline airplanes are currently more than one order of magnitude better than this. But if you have that, you can claim your plane works.

In physics, we typically start with mass-spring-damper system representation. Elementary physics and engineering typically has assumptions such as mass being constant. You develop all sorts of dynamical models and intuition with that assumption. But an aircraft burns fuel as it flies, meaning its mass changes during the course of the flight. Thus your models drift and you have to adapt to that.

Pilots would have tomes they'd have to switch between at various points of the journey and adaptive control algorithms alleviated this. They still needed the actual reference guide in the cockpit as a risk mitigation.

The difference between that decades old application is that you don’t need a billion parameter model to do flight control. Most people do not understand the historic development of these techniques. The foundation of them has been around for a while. What we have done with the newest batch of "AI" is massively scale them up.