We already have advanced autopilots that can fly commercial airliners. We just don't trust them enough to not have human pilots. I would trust the autopilot more than freaking Claude. We already do, every day.
Autopilot can be thought of better as "auto-aviate". That is to say, if there is already a navigation plan, the aircraft can follow that plan. Simple autopilots just keep the wings level, others can hold an altitude and change heading. More sophisticated ones can change altitude or even fully land the plane.
All of those things, however, require people to manage the "Navigate" part. "Aviate" is a deterministically solved problem, at least in normal flight operations. As you point out we trust autopilots today, including on (nearly) every single commercial flight.
LLMs are a poor alternative to "aviate", but they could be part of a better flight management automation package. The parent article tries to use the LLM to aviate, with predictable results.
If paired with a capable auto-pilot (not the relatively basic one on that C-172), the LLM could figure out how to operate the FMS and take you from post take-off to final approach and aid in situational awareness.
Currently, I don't think there is a commercial solution for GA aircraft that could say, "Ok, I'm 20NM from KVNY, but there are three people ahead of me in the pattern, so I have to do a right 360 before descending and joining downwind on 34L".
Having an LLM propose that course of action and tell the autopilot to execute on it definitely would be an improvement to GA safety.
And well if they are there they might as well fly for practise.
And no. I would not allow LLM in to the loop of making any decision involving actual flying part.
Much of the value of a human crew is as an implicit dogfooding warranty for the passengers. If it wasn't safe to fly, the pilots wouldn't risk it day after day.
To think of it, it'd be nice if they posted anonymized third-party psych evaluations of the cockpit crew on the wall by the restrooms. The cabin crew would probably appreciate that too.
Furthermore, the concept of "ejecting a passenger" from a flight would mostly not be something you do while in the air, unless you're nuts. Ejecting a passenger is either done before takeoff, or your crew decides to divert the flight, or continue to the destination and have law enforcement waiting on the tarmac.
Naturally, pilots get involved when it's a question of where to fly the plane and when to divert, but ultimately the cabin crew is also involved in those decisions about problem passengers.
Everyone likes to hand wring about this sort of stuff but I think it's the exception. Nailing the "macro level" decisions like "we'll go around this storm but we'll go over that one" or "we must divert to A or B and we will chose B because it's better for our passengers/company/crew even if it's 10min more flying to get there" are what keep the industry humming along mostly in the black rather than in the red. And it's these sorts of things that AI just tends to yolo and get mostly right when they're obvious but also get immensely wrong when any sort of gotcha materializes.
never mind that most crashes are caused by humans, very rarely by technical issues going amok
Because humans are the fallback for all the scenarios that the tech cannot reliably cover. And my intuition says that the tech around planes is so heavily audited that only things that work with 99.999...% accuracy work will be left to tech.
"Caused by a human" is the lowest tier, first base human instinct analysis of any accident, and as such, unless proven otherwise, can be discarded out of hand.
It comes down to: if a human mistake is capable of causing an accident, your system is badly designed because it assumes a part of the system known to be unreliable (a human) is always reliable.
The whole trick is designing systems that are safe despite humans being in the loop. Then you get to benefit from the advantages humans bring over machines without suffering the downsides.
It absolutely can; it's called autoland[1]. In really bad visibility, pilots simply can't see the runway until too late, and most aerodromes which expect these conditions have some sort of autoland system installed. The most advanced ones will control every aspect of the plane from top-of-descent (TOD), flaps and throttle configuration, long and short final, gear down, flare, reverse thrust, and roll-out, all the way to a full stop on the runway. Zero pilot input needed.
And most of this was already available in the late 1970s. We have absolutely no need for LLM-based AI in aviation; traditional automation techniques have proven extremely powerful given how restricted the human domain of aviation already is.