There's some interesting articles about the role of automation in the Air France 447 disaster:

Short article:

https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-tragic-crash-of-flight-af447-sho...

Much longer article, but 100% worth the read if you have time:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-...

Right.

This is a big issue for self-flying aircraft. Keeping the aircraft stable requires reliable altitude, airspeed, and orientation data. If you have that, you can stay in the air. AF 447 lost airspeed data, the flight control system dropped to a lower level, and gave up stall protection. It couldn't tell if the aircraft was stalling. That was enough to confuse the pilots so badly that they crashed a working airplane with plenty of speed, power, and altitude into the ocean.

A self-flying aircraft has the same problem, only worse. Without that info, it cannot stay in the air. There are fighters that need so much active stabilization that if you lose air data, you have to eject. Self-flying aircraft thus need really, really reliable air data sensors, and lots of them.

Getting airspeed from GPS has been suggested. There's one bizjet which does this. It can't be flown in areas where GPS jamming is in progress. Over-dependence on GPS is a problem.

All that is just to be able to fly straight and level. That's flight control. Navigation and landing are separate problems.

All this and the code needs to be written correctly especially with regards to edge cases. Thousands of planes have been flying around the world for several decades now and we still see unique accidents or slip-ups that have never occurred before.

Think of all the edge cases that need to be accounted for with all the different variables out there from weather to people misbehaving on the plane. It's only going to take one freak accident to have people not want to board a self-flying craft ever again.

Self flying doesn't mean no security guards or flight attendants, nor does it mean the plane can't make emergency landings

The only practical way to mitigate this that i can think of is more emphasis on regular simulator training. It may ultimately undercut the financial benefits of full time autopilot if pilots have to spend a larger fraction of their time on the clock in simulators, plus more sims would have to be built and operated.

The cockpit could just double as a simulator in non-emergency situations.

It's not as if a computer didn't crashe 2 737-MAX8 on take-off, despite pilots trying to correct the trajectory !

No amount of engineering genius can make up for human greed. Boeing took a gamble and they lost.

I wonder how much practice pilots get nowadays, when there are so few passenger flights worldwide.

"Russian jet crashed 'because captain couldn't land without autopilot"

https://metro.co.uk/2019/05/16/russian-jet-crashed-captain-c...

The jet crashed because lightning hit it, the plane did not have an feature to drop fuel and landed over max landing weight and there are other reasons.

Metro is not the most reliable source of information.

"N crashes prevented due to automation" - A headline that will/can never be written. Net result is that automation saves lives.

simulators might be good enough to train for most situations, maybe not to the same degree as if the pilot had been flying the whole time.

The situations that call for a pilot rather than an AI can only be trained for in a simulator.

The (few) hours in a simulator are probably far more valuable in an emergency than the thousands of hours of real flight.

(sport pilot here) Can you explain what are you thinking about? I had a few cases of unexpected problems while flying, simulators in my case would not help at all, but it may be different for large planes with huge inertia vs my larger-than-a-kite extremely sensible 2-seater.

You can't induce emergencies in actual passenger aircraft for the purpose of training. So your only option is a good simulator.