I’m not a pilot, but I just flew a helicopter over California

Sounds like the author just took a normal flying lesson but didn't call it that so they could write it up as a marketing piece for an app. Why the NYTimes ran it is beyond m… oh right money.

In my case, "with ZERO flight experience, I walked into a busy airport and within minutes I was at the controls of a full-sized airplane hurtling toward the White House!!" Translation: I signed up for a flight lesson during which my instructor let me turn the two-seater single propeller plane 360°. Both statements about that same event are technically true; one is so misleading it's basically a lie. (BTW it's called a "discovery flight" and it's super fun—highly recommend!)

The reason you don’t see small helicopters or fixed wing aircraft with complex autopilot systems coupled to the flight controls is that it’s expensive for a lot of the reasons you want it to be - the reliability, airworthiness and usability requirements that make it safe are also expensive to implement. At that price point it’s usually easier to have a human do all that work, especially for the types of missions those aircraft do. The technology has been there for decades, and there’s probably a reason why it hasn’t trickled down to these sorts of small aircraft yet.

Also, do you really want your flight control system to be entirely reliant on ensuring that the latest update to iOS doesn’t inadvertently brick the app that lets you control your aircraft? Let alone the possibility of someone exploiting a vulnerability in iOS to degrade your flight performance. There’s a reason that flight software is not trivially updated.

The use of the word "protocols" underlines that it's kind of weird that we're still handling these comms through scratchy, staticy analog radio with humans at both ends. ATC uses computers to track flights and assign flight paths, why is it so difficult to have their computers talk directly with the aircraft? And I don't even mean remotely controlled flight, just "here's what ATC is asking you to do, press button to ack".

That's mostly a rhetorical question, mind you, since modernizing ATC is a notoriously difficult problem and FAA's NextGen has been under construction since 2007, with vague hopes of getting something usable by 2025. But still.

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

The trouble today is that systems can fail, weather can change, and unlike a car you can’t just stop on the side of the road until the issue is fixed.

EDIT: remove unnecessary contextualization

The key quote is this: "You still need someone with training in communications protocols, what speed and elevation to fly and where the system is unsafe to operate."

Flying a helicopter is, by its nature, unsafe to operate. At any moment, you could have an emergency. If you have someone at the controls who only knows joystick flight when any such emergency occurs, good luck to them.

Helicopters are not like airplanes; they are not a "set and forget" experience. You have to actually fly the helicopter from point A to point B. You have to be ready to make that helicopter drop at a moment's notice because if the engine dies, you need air blowing up through the rotor to keep it spinning. If it slows down enough, that is automatically "Game Over". (Search "rotor stall".) In the helicopter I flew, you had two seconds to get the collective down, and that was only the beginning.

Watch [1]. At 1:24, the engine dies, and you hear a horn almost immediately. That's the low rotor speed horn. The horn goes off after about a second; that's because the pilot slammed the collective full down.

Then the pilot turns left and crash lands. Why? Because there were wires in front of him. The wires could have flipped the helicopter. Would a bot have flown into those wires? Almost certainly, and everyone would be dead.

Oh, and did you notice that the low rotor speed horn was sounding a lot during the crash sequence? That's because during such an event, you have to maintain the rotor speed in balance while trying to pick a spot and bring the helicopter in. He had a full helicopter, so he actually couldn't force the rotor speed much higher. And yet he couldn't go full down either because that would not slow them down near the ground.

In other words, those guys are lucky that their pilot is awesome. And even though he was, they still landed hard.

On top of that, as dmitrygr says [2], flying the helicopter is a fraction of what you have to do.

I would never fly in a helicopter where the "pilot" was anything but.

And the same goes for airplanes. They may be able to fly themselves, but that is only true in non-emergencies. And even in some non-emergencies.

Pilots are expensive because they train for the worst, and most of the time, when it does happen, they handle it with aplomb.

Bots will not. When it comes down to it, bots will never replace humans where life-threatening emergencies can happen.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYBf3XPwvaU

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28995347

There was no better way to guarantee that I (a network manager at the time), would ever be in that aircraft with its wheels off the ground.