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I would never sit in something like this. The idea of an autonomous airborne vehicle seems terrifying to me.
Last I looked, current commercial aircraft can do pretty much everything on their own but land.
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Looks like they can land these days too, though it's still the norm for the pilot to land.
https://executiveflyers.com/can-autopilot-land-a-plane/
I also recall that after that collision when a Swiss air traffic controller was trying to work two ATC positions some time back, it was clarified that for collision avoidance -- probably the most-critical task an air traffic controller deals with -- if a human air traffic controller tells the pilot to do one thing and the computer tells the pilot to do something else, you disregard the human and obey the computer, so in practice computers mostly do or can run the situation today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_%C3%9Cberlingen_mid-air_collision
Basically, the Russian plane followed the human ATC instructions, and the DHL plane followed the TCAS computer's instructions and collided.
One reason why Autoland is mostly only used in low viz conditions is because that's when it can perform the best since there's mostly near zero wind in those conditions. Also, while planes have autopilot, it's dumb, so you have to program it beforehand, and there's definitely cases where it just doesn't want to work right and you have to hand fly. While it is certainly useful as an aid to flying, as it flies better than pilots, it most certainly can go wrong and the pilot will have to take over in special or emergency senarios.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk
I agree. The reason I said what I said was that assumed that this taxi would not have a pilot in it. A lot of what planes do is automated but having a highly trained human pilot overseeing everything relieves me.
Agreed. I already don't trust car automation. No way I'm going to add a 3rd dimension to the list of possible failures.
What makes car automation so difficult is the fact that you have to account for human drivers and pedestrians. Flight automation might actually be an easier problem if all the vehicles are autonomous from the start and communicate with each other. You're also not flying bumper to bumper the way you drive on a road, so you have a much wider margin for collision avoidance.
It is at least a different problem, but adding in the element that any failure is a fatal one it just isn't enough that there are less obstacles in the way.
Sure it's a different problem, but chances of fatal accidents in cars are already significantly higher than in commercial air travel now. And same argument applies to planes.
Forget automation, I'd never trust an air vehicle for anything but extremely exceptional rides. Most technical difficulties encountered in a car would be deadly in these aircrafts, and they don't have the decades of strong regulations that the aviation industry does