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Comment by blauditore | Hacker News Reader

> Take off, landing and cruising are easy to automate.

Agree with take off and cruising, but landing is magnitudes more complex, at least much more difficult for humans. Do you have a source that this is reliably automated?

> many crash are avoided thanks to smart (and creative) pilots (see Hudson landing).

Actually, the emergency plan in case of engine failure after take off always gets discussed on ground before each start, along with defining an emergency landing area. So I would assume the Hudson river often gets scoped in those preflight discussions, even though such incidents rarely ever happen.

Source: I took flight lessons a long time ago.

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>Agree with take off and cruising, but landing is magnitudes more complex, at least much more difficult for humans. Do you have a source that this is reliably automated?

I believe all modern airliners are capable of fully automated landings as long as the airport supports them. To the point where automated systems can land in zero visibility where pilots are incapable of doing a manual landing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system#ILS_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland

These systems are so precise I've read they had to add a random factor to the landing location as the planes were all touching down on the exact same spot and damaging the runway.

This has been the case for a long time now. The landings are all still initiated by the pilots but there doesn't seem to be any fundamental technical reason fully automated flights couldn't be done today. But since we still require pilots to handle failures it's best to keep them in the loop instead of dumping a broken state with a huge workload when the automation happens to fail.

> Agree with take off and cruising, but landing is magnitudes more complex, at least much more difficult for humans. Do you have a source that this is reliably automated?

Landing has been automated since the 1960s. The first airplane to do it in service was the De Havilland Trident[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flVcxfOnWi0

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