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The answer to safety issues should not be a matter of restricting people from operating them. By that mentality, you'd ban a huge range of very useful things.

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I disagree, restricting humans is exactly what needs to happen for personal air travel to ever to be safe. The humans are the rogues, they're ones that are going to cause problems, not follow standard procedures, drink and fly, check their cellphones while flying etc. Imagine how much uncertainty and risk could be eliminated if you know that 100% of the vehicles in the air are all computer controlled, and use a common communication/navigation protocol. It would simplify everything.

Exactly. A sufficiently advanced "flying car" should be able to simply take a destination entered via smartphone, generate a flight plan, file the plan electronically, ping a regional air traffic control server for takeoff clearance, and run a preflight self-diagnostic, all in a matter of minutes.

Yep and then when the computer hangs up, or a lightning hits your plane and burn all the electronics, or the turbulence is so hi that the autopilot simply disconnects, or a sensor breaks in the middle of the flight and the flight computer throws erroneous predictions, or a software update introduces a bug that is active just in certain circumstances, etc... I think that eventually it will be possible but ( and I am talking of 30 million $ planes) actually there are simply to many failures too many times ( once a year is enough and I assure you that potentially dangerous failures happen far more often than that) to have a fully autonomous plane flying with people inside. Don't even start thinking of consumer grade planes.

A robotic car could be made to Self stop whenever a failure happens, that is a luxury that planes don't have.

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