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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Planes have been able to take off, fly to a destination on a flight path, land automatically, since I was in High School. I'm 64.

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I was about to post a snarky reply, but after actually reading TFA, it's not clear that this plane does anything different from a modern-ish commercial aviation autopilot except for being able to set it remotely. Still waiting for "real" autonomous flight meaning path planning.

The Garmin Autonomi system can do a limited form of real autonomous flight including path planning. It's mainly intended to automatically land the aircraft at the nearest safe airfield in case the human pilot becomes disabled.

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/blog/aviation/garmin-autoland-a...

Hahaha so true. Flying things aren't more abundant and prevalent because there must be insane lobby machinery and regulatory capture around the aviation industry. Plus economics of course.

For example, Zipline[1] is innovating in a part of the world, which wouldn't be possible elsewhere.

[1] https://www.flyzipline.com/

The factor limiting prevalence of flying things is that the biggest cost tends to be energy, and flight is pretty energy intensive. So it only makes sense when the travel time is so much more valuable than the energy cost of the transportation.

Plus, autonomously taking off/landing a large plane at designated locations where all other activity is carefully controlled, is much easier than having them fly and land in unpredictable environments such as at people's doors.

I mean theres probably not a worse case scenario for Ai vehicles than a plane crashing in a city. Car crashes are nothing in comparison. I don't think the regulation here is misplaced.

Definitely then, go automatic. Better record than human pilots?

Pilots' union I suppose.

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