I really hate this association of aircraft and car autopilots.

Aircraft operate in essentially empty space, and barring major mechanical failure the pilots typically have tens of seconds up to many minutes to act to avoid disaster. In a car you often have less than a second to react, and certainly never more than 4-5.

Aircraft hardware and software is tested, retested, tested again, and certified. Auto hardware and software is pushed out the door with reckless disregard for reliability.

There is really no comparison.

People forget planes, the kinds with sophisticated autopilot, don't come out with a new model revision every two to three years. Their cycles are very long, decades long.

Autolanding doesn't have the empty space, yet the first autolanding of a commercial flight with passengers aboard was done in '65.

Errr... yes it does. A runway is empty space. There are no other planes on it, it's a straight, well-maintained stretch of pavement, kept clear of ice and snow, with clear markings. Those are conditions so easy that non-self-driving cars can manage to navigate them for non-trivial periods of time without hitting anything! The Mythbusters have had a couple of cars go entirely out of control a couple times under those circumstances and the damage was a fence, once, IIRC.

There's more to landing than taxiing on the runway, like approaching the ground at a minimum of 250 km/h while getting hit by winds, often with very little visibility.

Hike dem goalposts!

They're just talking about reality of every day landings. If you don't like it, don't make up counterfactual claims in the first place.

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> Yes. I regularly fly in planes, which I have no control over, and which spend most of their time on autopilot.

Those planes with their auto-pilot system still have a means for the pilots to intervene. That's not quite the same as being in a vehicle for which no human has the possibility of intervening. (It's also a bit disingenuous to imply that it is.)

First, those pilots are heavily trained and certified, far more than car drivers. And second, far more accidents occur due to humans than due to mechanical failure (and of "mechanical failure", only a subset of those involve incorrect autopilot, though I haven't found that broken out). http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm puts total human causes at 67% (53% of which is pilot error), and mechanical failure at 20%.

Some accidents also occur specifically when pilots ignore/override the automatic systems; I'd be interested to see statistics on that, too, but I haven't found any.

Do you have statistics on the number of times that the pilot has to take control because the auto-pilot is unable to cope or is doing the wrong thing? Focusing just human-caused accidents vs. machine-caused accidents ignores this.

I don't have the stats, but I have a bit over 1000 hours as a pilot of light aircraft.

"What's it doing now?" is a common question in the industry, and the subject of this excellent American Airlines training seminar video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10&t=21m41s

(The whole video is good, but that's the specific automation confusion question.)