I really had to read through it twice to make sure they were just talking about car taxis picking up travelers, rather than some kind of prototype pilotless commuter helicopter or something.
In fact, it's pretty routine. Don't have the source at hand, but somewhere around 1% of all landings (at airports with ILS) are autolands.
I think it was Boeing that even requires at least 1 autoland per plane every 30 days or so.
You can find videos of this on YouTube. Completely hands-off.
But two interesting data points from the Wikipedia article I linked are that the first aircraft certification for ILS Cat III was in 1968, and Cat IIIB in 1975.
And IIRC by the 1980s, autoland was already a pretty common feature.
This is a competence you do not want to lose.
It's also the case that you can have a whole approach setup in your flight computer and at the last minute the controller gives you a runway change. You could drop your head down and start typing a bunch info the FMC but you're generally better off just disabling auto pilot and manually making the adjustment.
ILS being under maintenance and unavailable for certain runways is also far from unusual.
And their cost relative to other operational costs is so low there isn't even any pushback on regulations regarding there being two of them.
RCO is very much "pushback on regulations".
Currently we rely very much on the problem solving abilities of human pilots to deal with troublesome situations. Autopilot will disengage in many scenarios.
I still believe that having an actual pilot inside the plane that care for his own life is not a bad idea vs someone remote feeling a bit disconnected with the reality of a crash.
I have no idea if that works but I thought you were making a good contribution to the conversation by proposing a potential solution to the exact problem everyone is talking about.
Category IIIC ILS (full auto-land) does exist but requires special equipment for both the aircraft and airport. Human pilots have to actively monitor the system and take back control if anything goes wrong (which does happen).
Garmin also has the Autonomí auto-land system for certain general aviation aircraft which can attempt to land at the closest suitable airport. But this is only used for single pilot operation in case the pilot becomes incapacitated. It isn't suitable for regular flights.
Obviously a droneliner would look very different from the jets that are common today.
Look up the Airbus ATTOL project's first automated takeoff a few years ago.
Also, there's virtually no automation when it comes to interacting with ATC.
I just followed what my CFI and Cessna's manual for the C172 said (which iirc was giving input to rotate at 55kts).
It's fun to see/feel planes do stuff "on their own" (eg making them oscillate, or level on their own, or feeling ground effect, or even your own wake on steep turns) but it's not something you'd want to rely on (maybe with the exception of ground effect on short field takeoffs, but I digress).
It wouldn't be that hard to fully automate a flight from gate to gate when everything works perfectly. But the various failure modes, human error like airport vehicles entering active runway, all that requires human backup. Self-driving car can just stop to the side of the road and turn on emergency lights if its engine fails, with a plane things get much more complicated.
Cars can drive around without needing to talk to other cars or controllers.
Check out the Cirrus Autoland feature in their aircraft. They are all small personal aircraft, but the tech is pretty cool. Will talk to ATC and fully auto-land for you in the event of an emergency where the pilot is incapacitated.
The less you can change about the product and environment, then automation run slower and less effectively.
Air liner operations could be automated, but the minimum equipment list would be more stringent, the destination airport would not be able to take any equipment out of service for maintenance, visibility minimums would increase, takeoff and landing operations would require more slack time.
Besides all of that, the owner of the airplane would still want to have some crew on board.
In short, it's not worth it yet.
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There is also the paradox of automation: Automation generally makes the hard parts harder and the easy parts easier.
It's very cool stuff, technology wise, with potentially significant redesigns of cockpits, etc.
But the main thing is the plane basically needs to be able to operate just about entirely autonomously (especially during critical flight phases) in case the pilot is incapacitated.
In theory, once SPO is solved, autonomy is almost solved.
Cargo flights over oceans and (mostly) unpopulated areas might be a valid use case for SPO. Cargo pilots have always been considered somewhat expendable.
At the very least, I'd say it's at least two clean-sheet designs away (which I'd guesstimate at 30 years).
I'm a bit partial to it because I did a brief stint in the Airbus realm. Autonomy for airliners is an interesting set of challenges.
The point is you can't just "stop" a plane and wait for someone to figure things out (https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9449023?hl=en). Whatever the difficulties in dealing with an abnormal situation in a car, it is strictly much more difficult to deal with them in a vehicle constantly fighting the homicidal urge to fall out of the sky.
Also constant urge to fall out of the sky is a helicopter. A plane generally wants to glide.
The easy part is that it largely keeps itself moving, and that you have a thousand times fewer obstacles to avoid.
Both situations are very hard, and both have very hard aspects that only apply to that situation but not the other one. The plane is not "strictly more difficult".
As a car, finding a safe place to stop in an emergency is over a lot faster than in an airplane, but it's far more dangerous per second and per meter.
Flying is obviously much harder than driving, but it's a sort of harder that is generally more amenable to automation, though I still think pilots are a good idea because when it goes wrong it goes wrong much worse.
Automatic lane keeping in a car requires cameras that software needs to then analyze to find the lines in the road in real time. But if you want a "set it and read a book for an hour", then you have to respond to other traffic. No longer just some simple PID controllers, the software now needs to plan and execute based on surrounding traffic.
Time will tell...
months?! :)
"The [German pilots'] union said it had carried out a survey of more than 900 pilots in recent weeks, which found that 93% of them admitted to napping during a flight in the past few months."
-The Guardian, "Almost all German pilots admit to napping during flights in union survey"; 2025-09-10
With a car if the engine fails you just pull over. With an airliner it's not so simple. As a result the training for a pilot is much longer than for a bus driver say.
1d (train) - easy. just one lever
2d (car) - hard. super hard. why is it so crowded? who thought this was a good idea? you let teenagers do this?
2.5d (plane at takeoff or landing) - almost as hard as car. fewer pedestrians.
3d (plane flying) - easy even with all those extra levers
Automatic landings started in 1964. I think that it seems hard mostly because of how tightly regulated aviation is - modern technology could probably make things a lot better if people were more receptive to the idea of heavy automated aircraft over populated areas.
I doubt anyone has tested this in depth, but I'm not sure there are too many configurations of airplane these days where a human can safely land it and a computer can't. Maybe if a big chunk of wing or control surfaces were totally gone, but even a human pilot isn't getting 99% reliability in a situation like that.
In any case, I don't think that the first candidates for automation are gonna be passenger flights. It will probably be small cargo planes first - Cessna Caravans and other turboprop aircraft where the cost of paying pilots is roughly similar to the price of fuel.
3d, variant (orbital) - super hard, so hard that trajectory pre-calculations has to be performed
There's a reason the majority of accidents occur during take off and landing.
Spend some time listening: https://www.liveatc.net/search/?icao=ksfo
In an automotive setting you can almost always safely decelerate to a full-stop, put on hazards and call it a fail. Good luck trying that in an aircraft over urban areas.
In contrast when shit goes wrong for a plane we've got a big problem. Just stopping will definitely kill everybody, even from a modest altitude at a very low speed suddenly plummeting to the ground will straight up kill you. So, we want to land, albeit maybe we have to "crash land" destroying the vehicle to perhaps save its occupants.
You can buy (and indeed to some extent you can even retro-fit) emergency auto-land for small planes. Once engaged, or if set to do so automatically upon pilot failure the plane will figure out where it is (using GPS), pick the emergency radio frequency and announce the problem and its intended solution (I am a machine. My human pilot is incapacitated. I intend to fly to X location and land there. I am not listening to you and cannot understand you) and then it will fly to a chosen place and attempt to properly land the aeroplane, broadcast on radio that this airfield is now closed (this aeroplane is parked on the landing strip so you can't use it!) and then switch off.
Maybe the pilot is still alive and human medics can rush them to hospital. Otherwise maybe there are passengers who have been saved. In any case at least the aeroplane is now on the ground where humans can easily take over e.g. moving the plane so the airfield can re-open.