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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

> You could expect them to not call it autopilot, and instead call it lane keeping, like it really is.

That is all that most auto pilots in planes do, however. I don't get where "autopilot" somehow came to mean full autonomy in cars but not in planes (and other vehicles like boats) where the term was used previously.

Ridiculous.

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Yes, but with planes and ships (on ships it's almost always called track pilot and speed pilot, by the way) you can let go of the controls for extended periods of time. In cars, right now, that's a recipe for disaster. Functionally they may be the same, but practically speaking it's very different.

This is the key point. People don't care about what it does in detail, they think about the user experience.

Autopilots in planes can take you across the world. The car analogy would be only having to pull into and out of your driveway. And while they don't use it so frequently, aren't most of the planes most people fly in (big commercial aviation) certified to autoland themselves? The connotation of autopilot is absolutely that it can fly itself. Same with tesla's autopilot.

An autopilot in a Cessna can most definitely not take you around the world. Also, autopilots even in a commercial jet keep the plane steady along a route, they don't deal with collisions at all...you could call it "lane keeping" if you want to sue the airline industry for misleading us over a term they created.

Autolanding is not autopilot. In fact, autolanding is not even certified if multiple autopilots are not available to provide redundancy.

Most people who have flown don't even know what a Cessna is, much less its capabilities. It's totally irrelevant. Same with dealing with collisions, which aren't analogous challenges between flying and driving. To a non-engineer, the point is that autopilot gets you from point A to point B, not the details of how it has to achieve that.

> Also, autopilots even in a commercial jet keep the plane steady along a route, they don't deal with collisions at all...

Yes, they do. Then the problem is when the 2 autopilots of the 2 planes take the same evasive manœuvre...

Ah, the awkward old dance where two people try to walk through the doorway and end up mirroring each other's movements trying to get out of each other's way...

The aviation world actually solved this problem a long time ago. Everyone turns to their right. FAR 91.113:

> (e) Approaching head-on. When aircraft are approaching each other head-on, or nearly so, each pilot of each aircraft shall alter course to the right

(among other collision-avoidance regs in that section)

I'm pretty sure the aviation world inherited this protocol from the nautical world.

The planes talk to each other and run a common protocol that tells the pilots what to do to resolve the conflict. The problem is when one of the pilots doesn't listen to the nice robot voice yelling at him to DESCEND NOW!...

TCAS has the unit with the higher serial number yield to the one with the lower serial number.

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