sorry, when autopilot fails, or when atc calls, or when tcas alarms, or when any one of many other possible “complications” arise,the pilot does not have “minutes” to react.

autopilot in aviation requires the pilot to be attentive, and maintain situational awareness.

it’s not autonomous flying.

You don't understand.

When autopilot gives up in a plane, the PIC will respond in seconds. But anything dangerous is typically minutes or at least tens of seconds away from happening at that moment, if at all.

When tesla 'autopilot' gives up in a car, the driver may have less than a second before a collision. Or worse, as we've seen with the 'tesla tries to drive into a barrier' cases, the 'autopilot' might not give up at all and just straight up try to murder you with the only safety remaining being your own attention to the situation.

The fundamental problem with <99.99% reliable autonomous driving is that the driver's attention is guaranteed to stray due to lack of stimulation, and their reaction time will be at ~3s whereas the impeding crash might be only 0.3s away. In that regard, it's much better to just be manually driving and have your attention on the road.

And the consumer flip side of this is, what the fuck is the point of a self driving car if it requires you to fully pay attention and be ready to intervene at any given moment on such short notice? Waymo observed that their test drivers get bored and tired really quickly when operating like that, due to the simultaneous lack of stimulation but need to be able to take over on short notice. The answer is that SAE level 2 autonomy shouldn't be labelled as self driving because it isn't.

Tesla 'autopilot' is an over-marketed lane-keeping cruise control system which has virtually no chance of ever becoming SAE level 3. Tesla marketing has mislead a significant percentage of owners that they're in fact buying a level 3 system, which is why various regulators across the world are cracking down on Tesla now.

Disclosure: I own Tesla stock.

> Tesla 'autopilot' is an over-marketed lane-keeping cruise control system which has virtually no chance of ever becoming SAE level 3.

That's a very strong claim. Can you provide any evidence?

I own neither Tesla stock or car.

Car crashes tend to happen in a matter of a couple seconds at most.

This is uncommon in planes.

TCAS, for example: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/64847/how-much-...

> Traffic advisories are provided 35-48 seconds out and a Resolution will be provided 20-30 seconds out.

It's exceedingly rare you have 20-30 seconds warning of an impending car crash.

If you disengage with flying or driving the consequences can be catastrophic in seconds.

Fewer things to hit in the sky but you can never be complacent.

Imagine playing an iPhone game while PIC and accidentally flying into the clouds? The CFIT stats are terrifying.

Nonsense. What you're saying is true for smaller planes and 'manual' planes, but planes that have autopilot are by standards and by design required to warn the PIC of any issues with enough time to reasonably respond.

There is almost never a situation where a plane on autopilot can face catastrophe in <20 seconds.

Agreeing with you and just adding support by pointing out that’s precisely why autopilot isn’t used during takeoffs and landings...because seconds do matter in those scenarios

Plenty - an older plane and a midair collision. Bird strike. etc

It's extremely uncommon for a bird strike to down a plane. They cause one fatal accident every billion flight hours.

Midair collisions are why we have ADS-B (even in my dad's little four-seater prop plane) and TCAS. The are also exceedingly uncommon.

People driving into a ditch, pedestrian, barrier, or oncoming traffic is commonplace.

737 Max says you're wrong. Autopilot can fail in a hurry no matter what the vehicle.

The 737 MAX crashes involved several minutes between the first indications of trouble and the crashes.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-lion-air-cras...

> Lemme described "a deadly game of tag" in which the plane pointed down, the pilots countered by manually aiming the nose higher, only for the sequence to repeat about five seconds later. That happened 26 times during the 11-minute flight...

No bud, they had only seconds once MCAS took action during the ethiopian accident. Even if you kill power to the auto trim on the horizontal stabilizer in time, you are still nose down at low altitude and have to manually crank a wheel to undo the situation since you killed the power. You're screwed well before the crash.

Bullshit.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/what-passengers-expe...

8:39:55 a.m.: In a clear sign that something is amiss, the autopilot turns itself off.

8:40:00 a.m.: The MCAS activates.

8:43:04 a.m.: For minutes now, the captain has been using brute physical force to pull the control yoke back in order to keep the plane’s nose from sinking.

8:43:20 a.m.: The demon awakened by the restoration of electric trim reappears. MCAS kicks back in, pushing nose steeply down.

8:43:45 a.m.: Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 impacts a farm field at nearly 700 miles per hour

That's more than three minutes during which properly disabling MCAS would've been successful and saved the aircraft.

No, the incident happened at 8:40 and by 8:43 they couldn't pull the nose up because of the horizontal trim being pushed down. That is a very short amount of time to diagnose something completely unexpected. No matter what they did after 8:43 it was too late. You are aware what trim is right? You can't just fix that by pulling on the elevators if the entire rear airfoil is directed downward.

When’s the last time a car accident involved three minutes of advance warning of that nature?

The nature of the MCAS issue is it kept firing every 5 seconds, making things progressively harder to counteract. It takes a while to get to the “can’t counteract” point.

It fires every 20 seconds and it takes 2 iterations before it's basically unrecoverable. However, you aren't taking into the account in the "I think I fixed it factor" after the first couple iterations. It's not like they had all 3 minutes to figure it out and fix it. A good amount of time was wasted to see if the fixes had an effect. This answer does a good job of explaining all the things that the pilot has to do in those 3 minutes.

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-pilots-on-the-Lion-Air-and...

That they were able to override the MCAS for several minutes is clear indication it was a recoverable issue with the right training. In fact, a different crew in the same plane the day before did just that.

To return back to the original point for a moment:

40 seconds is a shitload more time to react than the 1-2 seconds you've got when oncoming car traffic veers into your lane unexpectedly. Things in cars happen faster than in planes. A couple seconds of inattention in a plane won't kill you in the same way they will in a car.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. This is another great misunderstanding of how any autopilot works or what it means.