I have zero expertise for my claim, but I feel like autonomous flight is easier than autonomous driving.

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.

In the abstract yes but in practice the economic (ratio of cost of pilot to pax miles) and safety context of aviation mean fully autonomous flying has to be extremely robust before it has actual utility in industry.

On the happy path, yes. Though I don’t think takeoff is automated yet.

Currently we rely very much on the problem solving abilities of human pilots to deal with troublesome situations. Autopilot will disengage in many scenarios.

0d (parked) - null program easy

1d (train) - easy. just one lever

2d (car) - hard. super hard. why is it so crowded? who thought this was a good idea? you let teenagers do this?

2.5d (plane at takeoff or landing) - almost as hard as car. fewer pedestrians.

3d (plane flying) - easy even with all those extra levers

When everything is working correctly, no other pilots have emergencies, and no temporary restrictions are in place, and there are no clouds in the sky. Then yes, it /could/ be easier, but almost always it never actually is.

There's a reason the majority of accidents occur during take off and landing.

Spend some time listening: https://www.liveatc.net/search/?icao=ksfo

It depends a bit on your safety standards. There are already autonomous flying things delivering blood and blowing up oil depots where it doesn't matter so much if stuff goes wrong, but to be an airline pilot you have to know how to deal with a huge range of emergencies and systems packing up.

With a car if the engine fails you just pull over. With an airliner it's not so simple. As a result the training for a pilot is much longer than for a bus driver say.

I also feel like the demand is way, way lower. A pilot can't be that large a % of the cost of a flight. Maybe if we lived in the jetsons era.

Not a pilot myself but it seems that a large part of the danger with flying is that when something goes wrong you are much more likely to have a high speed crash. Cars don't even usually travel at speeds that planes crash at.

When shit goes wrong for a car (such as Waymo) you just stop. Now, that's not trivial, but it's also not very difficult, I expect most of it can happen even if the Waymo hardware itself were suddenly destroyed, rolling along is the hard bit so not doing that isn't too difficult. Everybody aboard can just leave when it stops moving.

In contrast when shit goes wrong for a plane we've got a big problem. Just stopping will definitely kill everybody, even from a modest altitude at a very low speed suddenly plummeting to the ground will straight up kill you. So, we want to land, albeit maybe we have to "crash land" destroying the vehicle to perhaps save its occupants.

You can buy (and indeed to some extent you can even retro-fit) emergency auto-land for small planes. Once engaged, or if set to do so automatically upon pilot failure the plane will figure out where it is (using GPS), pick the emergency radio frequency and announce the problem and its intended solution (I am a machine. My human pilot is incapacitated. I intend to fly to X location and land there. I am not listening to you and cannot understand you) and then it will fly to a chosen place and attempt to properly land the aeroplane, broadcast on radio that this airfield is now closed (this aeroplane is parked on the landing strip so you can't use it!) and then switch off.

Maybe the pilot is still alive and human medics can rush them to hospital. Otherwise maybe there are passengers who have been saved. In any case at least the aeroplane is now on the ground where humans can easily take over e.g. moving the plane so the airfield can re-open.

My layman's understanding is that we've been doing it already for decades with expert system "AI", so likely much easier than navigating streets with other people.

Navigation might be easier. The battery and safety tech isn't there yet to make it practical.

In a pinch, a car can just put on its hazards and pull over

Don’t have a ref but heard that it’s been safe for quite a while but they keep the pilots around due to consumer fear rather than actual improved performance. Curious if anyone can confirm.

What would ever make you think that?

In an automotive setting you can almost always safely decelerate to a full-stop, put on hazards and call it a fail. Good luck trying that in an aircraft over urban areas.