To get a Tesla all that is required is enough money to buy it.
Yes, a plane autopilot only maintains bearing and altitude, but that's also all a plane needs to do. An equivalent system in a car would be utterly useless, so if you're taking Tesla's terms literally then they're telling you they've made something that's of no use to you.
If, instead, you think of an autopilot as being something that allows the pilot to take their attention off the controls to do something else then, well, Tesla's autopilot explicitly doesn't do that. So it's not the right name when taken either literally or figuratively, so little wonder people get confused.
Quite the opposite, there are common scenarios when the plane needs to deviate from pre-programmed course or otherwise can't rely just on an autopilot. All of them are handled either by higher-level automation (eg. ILS for landing), or by pilots themselves. Unsurprisingly the hand-over is signaled similarly to what Tesla does - audible and tactile cues for the pilots. A pilot can also initiate take over at any time by the way of flight control inputs. Lastly, regardless whichever automation is active, the pilot in charge is held both morally and legally responsible for the airplane and passengers or cargo, and expected to turn off the the automation when proper.
All in all Tesla's "Autopilot" already does more than an autopilot does. And while I'm somewhat pessimistic on how quickly it can become better than humans both statistically and also in rare scenarios, there is constant progress by all major vendors.
Common scenarios for an autopilot to be disconnected, or to initiate handover:
- collisions avoidance; the air corridors are busy places, and maneuvering to maintain safe distance from other planes is expected
- take-off and landing, though those can be performed by higher level automation
- pattern holding around the air-port, where course change is frequent
- re-routing to avoid severe weather or handle emergencies
- handling major turbulences (autopilots have limited maximum rate of change for safety reasons)
- loss of instrumentation, due to icing, foreign object ingestion, malfunctions; a common setup is "2 out of 3 sensors need to be in agreement"
As you can see, the equivalents of some of those scenarios are already handled pretty well by self-driving cars, like self-parking, or collision avoidance.
>The only thing an airplane autopilot does is keep the bearing and altitude constant
If autopilot means that then we had autopilot in years, I remember students creating toy projects that were following the road.
The issue is that some(no idea of a number) people, including Tesla owners, think the car drives itself and do not pay 100% attention. I am not sure why they do not understand that there is a chance they will get killed or kill somebody and the driver has full responsibility.
That was probably true in the 1950s. Today's flight automation manages the entire flight profile including climbout and descent, fuel management, etc.
(skip down to the section that begins "Here, let me give you a quick demonstration:")
Not if the name was chosen to deliberately be misleading.
Almost all commercial airlines have an autopilot, but not one of them flies without an actual pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit. The only thing an airplane autopilot does is keep the bearing and altitude constant -- Tesla's "autopilot" actually does a bit more than that. Is the outrage over calling it "autopilot" based on the public's misunderstanding of how an airplane's autopilot works?