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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

The hard part of automated driving is dealing with all the ground clutter that planes serenely fly over. If pedestrians could charge out in front of a 777 going 650 mph at 34,000 feet... well... we'd be living in pretty different world! And in that world, flying would be much more difficult. Not just for computers but for humans too.

Flying is obviously much harder than driving, but it's a sort of harder that is generally more amenable to automation, though I still think pilots are a good idea because when it goes wrong it goes wrong much worse.

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Flying is almost always easier than driving. landing is hard. Bad weather is hard. But just flying - human pilots have napped many times over the years and it only rarely is an issue. Airplanes with primitive autopilot are very good.

Yeah, a primitive autopilot in a plane just needs an altimeter and compass, but a AoA sensor, speedometer, fuel level sensor, and pitch sensor help to detect unsafe conditions like runaway pitch, stalling, overspeed, low fuel, etc. Each of those sensors is providing a simple 1-dimensional data point. Redundancy is relatively inexpensive.

Automatic lane keeping in a car requires cameras that software needs to then analyze to find the lines in the road in real time. But if you want a "set it and read a book for an hour", then you have to respond to other traffic. No longer just some simple PID controllers, the software now needs to plan and execute based on surrounding traffic.

Yep. 0ft-1000ft AGL Takeoff, Climb, Approach, and Landing are the tough bits. The rest (Cruise) is very low demand and much easier than driving.

Taxiing is probably harder to automate than the rest. But you could have pilots on hand to taxi to the runway, and take a shuttle to the other end and hop on a just landed plane to taxi to the gate. Or you could use tugs for ground movement.

I'm not convinced - in a commercial airport taxiways are controlled by a ground control systems, not just pilots looking out the window. If the only airplanes around are also equips with the self taxi system they just report position to the central control and that tells them when to go. There needs to be emergency overrides for when that system fails, or a small plane without it is around, but that can be handled by stopping everyone else in the area until the hazard is gone.

Time will tell...

There's also all of the service vehicles when you get closer to the gates. The likely damage from an incident during taxiing is much less than during take off or landing, but I think the risk of having an incident is higher and the situation is trickier to manage. And it's super doable to have a pilot come on to manage that, and drop off after the hard part; you couldn't reasonably have pilots do a takeoff and then jetpack over to an arriving plane to do the landing, but it wouldn't be unreasonable for ground moves... similar to canal pilots taking ships through canals.

Do you have a source for that? As to my knowledge advanced systems (such as lights on the twy directing you) are only present at very few airports. Recent incidents even happened due to RWY incursion without a ground controller noticing under bad visibility. So we are at a level where your runway is not even protected accordingly, let alone your 50+ taxiways.

>human pilots have napped many times over the

months?! :)

"The [German pilots'] union said it had carried out a survey of more than 900 pilots in recent weeks, which found that 93% of them admitted to napping during a flight in the past few months."

-The Guardian, "Almost all German pilots admit to napping during flights in union survey"; 2025-09-10

Years as since humans have flown planes stable enough not to need constant attention. On a calm day you don't need autopilot, just set your trims correctly and some airplanes will hold course well enough for a short nap - though of course this is more likely to result in a crash (which likely has happened, though it is hard to guess why a plane crashed beyond pilot error)

Yeah, but a 1% angle over a long period of time intersects with the ground, and I wouldn't want to trust your alarm clock with 200 lives.

The pilots would get an extra "Woop! Woop! Terrain! Terrain! Pull up! Pull up!" redundant alarm clock, although it's terrifying to rely on it.

I wouldn't want to either, and even the pilots who have done it claim accident. It has worked out for a lot.

Not to mention that almost all civilian planes in the US are required to broadcast a bunch of details that include their coordinates and altitude on a public channel (ADS-B). It's the kind of automated collision avoidance input that you'd probably dream of as a self-driving system engineer. Basically the only thing you'd need to avoid via more complex systems is the odd military traffic, small craft at low altitudes, and birds.

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