Takeoffs, landings, and navigating dense air traffic in controlled spaces are all still "not smooth enough" for autonomous sytems if human life is valued.

Yes, planes can take off and land on auto pilot - but real world conditions throw curve balls, ditto approaches and departures from high traffic airports.

Even "boring" 10 hour point to point legs that might normally be fully autopilot can be a problem in case of mechanical failures or other unexpected events.

This is such an “armchair expert” take on this.

Planes are not fully autonomous. They will not be for a very long time due to the regulatory environment aviation is entrenched in.

Because the people who own those planes, and people who regulate the airline industry don't want human casualties under their watch - a fairly reasonable concern.

Status-quo is not something you typically argue for, its what you need to argue against. At which point you need to make a positive argument with data that can convince them otherwise.

This is likely achievable in theory now, at least between major airports with ILS-equipped runways, but fully automated systems couldn't handle present traffic coordination procedures. You'd need a series of new standards to replace human-oriented air traffic control with a scheme in which ground computers could directly interface with aircraft flight management systems. Developing something like this and rolling it out on a global basis, in such a safety-critical application, would likely take two or three decades. Not clear it's really worth the trouble, since you'd want backup pilots for unexpected situations anyway.

What would probably make more sense is to just add a single-button auto-land feature, that sends an emergency destress call and configures and invokes existing automatic navigation, approach, and landing features to find the nearest appropriate airport and land. Given how rarely this would be used, there wouldn't be a need for the system to navigate complex traffic patterns, as ATC could just clear other aircraft out of the way. Something like this has recently become available for general aviation aircraft, but I haven't heard about anyone working on it for airliners yet.

There is no fucking way I'm stepping onto a commercial airliner without highly trained human beings at the helm. That is my SWE/"stemlord" take-- complex software systems, or at least the organizations that produce them, are generally not to be trusted with your life.

Pilots already serve as a backup to an autonomous system. They're also useful for takeoff and landing.

In addition to the other reasons - if someone is going to be qualified to fly the plane as backup, they need regular hours of practice. They could get that in a simulator perhaps, or flying practice flights, or ... by flying the actual plane.

You propose replacing pilots with … pilots?

IANAP. I think a lot people enjoy flying airplanes. I think most landings are manual. Thus pilots highly skilled to land safely also in difficult situations. And instruments can fail.

What do you hope for with removing humans in the loop?

You would end up in a world where no human pilots remain to land aircraft where the automation isn't ready to do so.

Even if unassisted takeoff and landing were possible, no airline is going to accept the risk of operating such a system.

You’re ignoring the hard part that they don’t yet use 100% autopilot for.

Edge cases