The private airport idea is interesting. From a pilots perspective, one of the major roadblocks to these systems being widely integrated into the current infrastructure is managing traffic. If they’re largely operated separately from manned traffic that eliminates nearly all of those difficult problems.

The comment about edge cases causes me to think about weather. I don’t think many non-pilots have a good appreciation of how much complex decision making goes into operating in and around inclement weather. Fuel constraints, airport constraints in terms of equipment, weather, and traffic, unreliable forecasting, etc. Theres a lot that goes into it and each aircraft begins making decisions that involve several people, including the on-board pilots.

It seems like you can have one operator for 5-10 aircraft but then suddenly the weather rolls through and every single one of those aircraft needs individual attention and planning. Did you save much by still having an operator/craft? Or do you need more stringent weather requirements to operate these aircraft? Or do you try to have the best of both worlds and eventually the autonomous systems just crash themselves in non-populous areas absent other guidance.

If these systems are largely grounded every time there’s inclement weather I can’t imagine the people who advertise “the world, on time” are going to be too keen on operating them at scale. Dispatch-ability is a major factor in these types of operations.

Let’s say you have one virtual pilot for 10 planes. They won’t all be landing at the same time. So that pilot could guide each one down successively during inclement weather.

I bet that would be way more fun than the bunches of sitting around that I imagine is currently part of the job.

[pilot here]

There's a lot more to managing planes in bad weather than landing them: you can't exactly fly through a thunderstorm.

Furthermore, sometimes go/no-go decisions have to be made a long way out. If it looks like there might be lots of thunderstorms near your destination, it's sometimes prudent to divert immediately rather than risk being near an airport with weather too bad to land AND low fuel.

A great example is a youtube video by stevo1kinevo: he's flying a TBM 850 (fast turboprop) from Florida to Boston International. While checking the weather enroute he decides the chance of storms near Boston is too high, and with the complexity of getting in and out of a major airport, he decides well in advance to divert to an airport on Long Island. This sort of stuff happens all the time and is the very definition of good airmanship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZzOsXya4zw

So, one experienced pilot will need to make this decision for all roboplanes.

> you can't exactly fly through a thunderstorm.

You can't, but can a UAV? I'm curious how much more tolerant of bad weather a plane can be if there are no people inside. Are storms often strong enough to knock a plane out of the sky?

> Are storms often strong enough to knock a plane out of the sky?

Simply put: yes. Not just any thunderstorm. All thunderstorms.

All aircraft avoid thunderstorms. It's not a case of discomfort for humans inside it; it's about the risk to aircraft themselves.

Thunderstorms contain severe updrafts and downdrafts and huge windshear between them. Aircraft cannot outclimb the downdrafts so cannot maintain altitude inside them. And severe windshear will tear them apart.

The only reason you don't hear about aircraft lost in thunderstorms is because pilots avoid them. All of them.

A friend of mine who is a glider pilot once compared thunderstorm to a steamroller.

If you get hit by the leading edge your plane will get smashed into the ground. If you somehow get to the back part, your plane might end up in the stratosphere, which might be just as fatal due to very low temperature and lack of oxygen.

He mentioned some early gliding pioneers who were insane and lucky enough managed to "ride" a thunderstorm and achieve record breaking flight distance - and somehow not getting killed in the process.

So how do hurricane hunters survive? Are hurricanes less, for lack of a better word, volatile?

> Are storms often strong enough to knock a plane out of the sky?

And then some. The forces in a run of the mill thunderstorm could rip the wings off a plane in seconds.

The addition of people to the plane makes zero difference to storm survivability, why would it?

Storms are definitely regularly large enough to bring down even large aircraft, it doesn't happen often because planes of systems on board to ensure they avoid such weather, but it can happen!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Airways_Flight_242

Flying by instruments, I wonder how high the risk truly is. One of the bigger concerns might be an instrument failure, like the failure of the airspeed sensors on Air France 447.

Very very high. What fuels a thunderstorm is large amounts of air rising, and falling very rapidly. When the aircraft encounters those air movements it can very quickly exceed the structural limits of the aircraft.

Some more detail: flying in rising or sinking air isn't a problem in itself, as long as you can tolerate the change in altitude. But flying from one into the other, fast, is a sure way to exceed structural load levels.

There were many failures in the cockpit of AF447. Almost all of them were aft of the instruments.

Problem exists between keyboard^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H yoke and chair

On the ground operator can also make those calls? Really, it's like fleet-specific air traffic controller + rc pilot.

Yeah, definitely. And thinking about it more I'm sure there are some air traffic controllers that manage 10+ airplanes fine (although they aren't as involved as the pilots, so a remote operator would have a higher workload).

I bet a fleet of commercial autonomous aircraft operation out of private facilities would also have a lot more common procedures (all their airspeeds, climb/descent rates, etc would all be the same), so it might even be easier.

Also maybe they could pool resources? Like pilots in an area where everything is fine leave their planes on full auto and go take over another plane from another pilot?

Edit: Or maybe, expect the planes to be fully auto, then have a bank of pilots available to take over any plane that is having troubles.

The sitting around can be boring but there’s little that’s more fun than turning off the autopilot and hand flying an Expressway Visual 31 at La Guardia in gusty winds with traffic departing runway 4.

Do it at a workstation in a desk chair with none of the “stress” of the situation and I’m going to find another career. The combination of skills needed and the threat of life and limb just make stuff like that exciting in a visceral way that would never be possible with an RC plane.

As to your argument, yes the load would have to be balanced across flights at various stages. You’d be surprised how many planes are all in a very similar boat though when they’re all converging on a hub in SE USA and a summer thunderstorm comes booming through. Spend an evening watching MEM on FlightAware and LiveATC as FedEx does their thing. What seems like the whole fleet comes marching in through a very narrow window of time.

I don’t think that the same population who currently flies would be the ones who would fly pilotless planes from desks.

I’ve flow personally for 22 years. Other than simulator-based training, I have no interest in flying a flight simulator. Why do that when the real thing is available and so much more compelling as you describe? No way I’d fly from a desk either, but that doesn’t mean that someone else wouldn’t be happy to have that job.

Agreed, it’s not in the interest of my career. I was more just commenting about the GP’s thought that it might be more fun to get to only intervene for landing. Ten simulator landings will never outweigh one real landing, even if the price is butts in seats for 10 hours.

If the system is designed right, they could be even safer than piloted planes in the case of an emergency. Currently, if a pilot is flying and, say, the engines stop and can't be restarted, they're going to be thinking about trying to survive and get to a place where they can land or at least ditch the plane survivably.

An autonomous system doesn't have to do that - if it decides that the situation is unrecoverable, it can spend its remaining time in the air finding and navigating to the most sparsely populated point of impact within its range. Something like "Engines out and won't restart? Find the nearest/largest body of water and ditch into it".

There is at least one autonomous system on the market today that can do just that - find the nearest airport and land.

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/autonomi/

That's pretty incredible for those small planes that I doubt have all the sensors jets do

You'd be surprised. Typically, you'll find that jetliners are older and therefore have an older tech stack, but also that they're redundant. Multiple pitot tubes, for example. On newer GA planes, there may be less redundant sensors, but the technology running them can be more modern and more powerful. The tools on the jet get the job done with two pilots and are there to make money, while the GA airplane is going to be piloted single pilot, and more likely for pleasure.

GPS gets you 99.9% of the way there. Runways are 100+ft wide. 10ft precision is fine.

If the runway does happen to have ILS, there's another authoritative source of information too.

Moreover, high end dual frequency GPS receivers like you'd surely put in a plane will typically have sub-meter precision.

Depending on the environment? GPS is still susceptible to signal reflection and LoS blocking.

Sure, depending on the environment. But when an aircraft is in one of those environments where reflections and line of sight to satellites are an issue, GPS accuracy is the least of your concerns.

This is in regards to an emergency response system, so an attacker would have to wait for an emergency to attack and well, you may as well just see how it pans out naturally rather than risk jail time to try and coerce an accident that might already be happening.

It’s not (just) about attack though. If you have your emergency in a place where the surrounds cause GPS to be inaccurate you cannot rely on GPS. Ergo since you cannot plan where to have an emergency relying on GPS is not sufficient.

I don't believe LoS blocking is really an issue as you approach an airport runway from above...

If you can make sure you only have emergencies when near an airport then you've already solved a lot of the hard problems.

> they're going to be thinking about trying to survive and get to a place where they can land or at least ditch the plane survivably.

I think you immediately have to question how often this has been the source of a disaster. To me, this seems highly unlikely to have been a problem, or to be a problem at all.

Most accidents happen near airports. Most airports are in populated areas, because an airport far removed from a populated area is next to useless in terms of freight or passenger transport.

> An autonomous system doesn't have to do that

Well.. it can't. Which is part of the problem:

> it can spend its remaining time in the air finding and navigating to the most sparsely populated point of impact within its range.

That's a whole separate automation and computer intelligence problem on it's own. There's also no guarantee that a sparely populated area isn't completely empty or even currently unused for any civil or special purpose. Expecting a computer to "solve" this problem is asking a lot.

Just look at the Gimli Glider as an example[1]. Choosing a "safe" place to have an emergency isn't at all obvious and assumptions based upon outdated information are dangerous in and of themselves.

> Find the nearest/largest body of water and ditch into it

Finally.. even if it could make this determination, safely, and with enough sensor observations to reduce human loss of life on the ground, you're presuming a plane without engines can always reach this apparent planned crash site. If your plane can't add velocity, your ability to plan _anything_ is severely curtailed.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider

> Most accidents happen near airports. Most airports are in populated areas

Are they?

I'd argue that they generally aren't... except that, over time, cities may grow until they are right next to the airport again. And then new airports get constructed - usually far away.

> terms of freight

Only for certain classes of freight. You distribution center needs ready access to transportation, it doesn't have to be next to your consumers. We are not delivering packages to their destinations with planes, after all. Usually trucks do that.

> If your plane can't add velocity, your ability to plan _anything_ is severely curtailed.

Not an issue with pre-planned routes. There can be contingencies in place for malfunctions at any stage in the flight.

I wouldn't worry too much with engine failures and the like. Worry about sensor problems.

> I'd argue that they generally aren't... except that, over time, cities may grow until they are right next to the airport again. And then new airports get constructed - usually far away.

That sounds backwards. Airports get built as close as possible to the cities they serve. For newer airports that ends up being some distance away because they need to avoid existing homes.

> You distribution center needs ready access to transportation, it doesn't have to be next to your consumers. We are not delivering packages to their destinations with planes, after all. Usually trucks do that.

The point of the plane is to save on trucking time though, so you want a distribution center fairly close to population centers.

Newer airports almost as a rule get built far way not only to avoid homes . Homes get built near airport, then airport gets sued anyway. It is more that it very difficult and very very expensive to get the size of land a large airport needs close to the city. It is also the politics of everyone wanting a piece of development.

Airports get built "close" in the sense that most international airports are named after a city, and the distance to that city is generally minutes rather than hours of travel.

Airports get built "far away" in the sense that, between land prices and noise abatement, airports are generally on the very outskirts of a city at the time they are built and the city's central train station will be much closer to the city centre.

But apart from military bases on remote islands, no airports are so remote that "don't worry where you ditch the plane if there's a problem, there's nothing near the airport" would be an option :)

Most accidents happen within the first three and last eight minutes of the flight.

That's assuming you can anticipate the problem. The obvious edge case is that something goes badly wrong but the software does not recognize it as outside the design envelope.

This is a great take.

The more we reduce the human survival instinct around these jobs, the better we'll all be.

Humans do dumb shit when we're flooded with chemicals, both internal and external.

Computers do some pretty "dumb shit" when they're flooded with data and running bad algorithms. I mean 737MAX didn't need a pilot error in order to do something critically bad.

To be fair.. the computer in the 737max was being used to patch over the 737max being bad at flying.

Not bad at flying, but flying not like other 737. Which would have required retraining, which is a hard sell.

Interestingly enough, there are airports that are dedicated to shippers.

For example, there's Wilmington Air Park in Wilmington, OH: https://www.wilmingtonairpark.com/

Apparently, Amazon started flying through there in September of 2019: https://airportimprovement.com/article/wilmington-air-park-w...

the fort worth alliance airport in texas is a much better, larger example of this.

> Edge cases shouldn’t result in loss of life, so getting through regulations and insuring should be much easier than other situations.

I would hope there is some regulatory concern about flights over populated areas. Yes, there are a number of ways this concern might be addressed, but like everything else, I expect the FAA to be really anal about it.

I also hope they are concerned about potential remote hijacking. It is probably desirable that these things can be overridden by a human operator, rather than solely relying on the flight computer. But that opens the possibility to attackers as well.

I don't think distinct flight routes would be necessary or even preferable. They'd have to integrate these planes into the national airspace system, and at that point you're using the routes (airways) that everyone else uses.

My worry is that once these things are fully automated and planes are no longer manned this will also create an infrastructure for future 9/11 like attacks.

The issue is finding land that is effective for the transition points. You need these private airports to have easy access to highways/existing cargo/delivery infrastructure.

It is usually cheaper to just build your fulfillment center next to an existing airport which already meets these requirements.

Don't forget that aircraft falls on someone or someone's property.

To be fair, maintaining straight and level flight— i.e., not falling out of the sky— is the easiest part of flying an airplane. Computers have been good at that for a while; in fact, that’s how airline flights are controlled these days during basically all of cruise flight (by autopilot).

Takeoff and landing are the tricky parts.

(I say this as someone who’s firmly on the skeptical side of the spectrum regarding the near-term prospects for fully autonomous vehicle control.)

Garmin has already gained FAA approval for an emergency autoland system that integrates with most modern private aircraft. It is designed to be used in case of an emergency where the pilot has "stopped functioning". It finds the nearest appropriate airport, announces it's intentions to ATC and then flies to and lands at that airport.

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/autonomi/

There are landing procedures where the pilot simply follows the machine instructions for a long while already. And it works perfectly well where it's available.

Also, the take-off being easier, it's not conceivable that a machine couldn't do it. The reason there is no such machine today is exactly because it's easier, so pilots never need any help.

Instead, the hard part isn't flying. it's all the things an airplane does while landed. It's taxing, interacting with other planes, interacting with other vehicles (there are a lot of them in an airport), parking, etc. If the airport is entirely built for automation, I imagine that will become much easier.

That’s one thing that boggles my mind about airports: it seems like they’re all designed from the ground-up as if it’s the first airport ever built. Terminals too.

I get that the biggest airports have grown organically, but I’m surprised a city building a new terminal or airport (Berlin anyone?) can’t order a standard proven design like they’re building a McDonald’s or Holiday Inn.

Airports are built to fit the space they're allocated. And runways have to be sited accounting for approach patterns that can be many hundreds of miles. Given the variation in geography of the planet Earth there's zero one-size fits all construction that can be done.

Airports are standardized to the degree they can be standardized. There are entire sections of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Design Handbook devoted to airport terminals and other large transportation spaces. But these spaces have to be designed to fit the place that they are constructed in.

Berlin is disaster and running joke on so many levels.

If the city was competent about the project, they would have actually hired people who knew what they were doing. While new terminals and airports are not as standard as Holiday Inn, there are plenty of constraints in most cities [1], that do not allow a lot of room for radical change, and design usually come out not widely different.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QZ3eozyQfU

> Also, the take-off being easier, it's not conceivable that a machine couldn't do it. The reason there is no such machine today is exactly because it's easier, so pilots never need any help.

I don't think it's just that take off is easier, but that it's also more dangerous than landing. If something happens during take-off and the computer needs help, it needs the pilot to step in quickly so you don't have time to do a computer -> person hand-off.

I don't think it would affect this proposal (no passengers on board, and package-only airports can be located far away from things to hit) but worth noting.

> If something happens during take-off and the computer needs help, it needs the pilot to step in quickly so you don't have time to do a computer -> person hand-off.

The same happens at landing, but the airplane is moving faster.

Yes, but faster is usually better in this case.

Over simplifying, there are a lot of situations during take-off and landing where stopping isn't an option. During landing, the extra speed helps you take-off and try again (go around) with minimal risk. A computer can pretty easily handle "something's weird, TOGO and have the pilot take over." Take-off doesn't have that safety margin.

> Also, the take-off being easier, it's not conceivable that a machine couldn't do it. The reason there is no such machine today is exactly because it's easier, so pilots never need any help.

It exists:

"Airbus demonstrates first fully automatic vision-based take-off"

https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-releases/en/2020/01/ai...

Takeoff is relatively straightforward: planes "want" to fly. Deciding if, when and how you should abort a takeoff is less straightforward.

Pilots have to learn the schematics of electrical wiring behind the dashboards. They are expected to do problem-solving in case of malfunction, and this happens really often. The first time asymetric thrust was used to pilot a plane (ailerons and elevators didn’t work), it was done without being in the books. I wonder how this can work with computers, given they have very fee sensors compared to humans (« Do you smell smoke coming from the vents? ») and they are not yet capable of reasoning. They need to be trained millions of time for each failure mode. Granted, thanks to 70 years of experience with MD, we have listed those failures quite extensively and this part is well documented.

> Do you smell smoke coming from the vents?

This is not the most common way to detect a fire in an aircraft (unless GA). The most common way is "FIRE" being indicated in the annunciator panel.

> Pilots have to learn the schematics of electrical wiring behind the dashboards.

No they are definitely do not. They will only know the wiring if they are also mechanics.

They need to know which fuses control what, but that's a much higher level.

> They are expected to do problem-solving in case of malfunction

Also no. The first thing to be done is triggering the memory items. Those are memorized. Zero thought here. Pilots have to (and generally will) fall back to what they have been instructed to do.

Next there's the checklists. They will execute the checklists line item by line item. No thinking happens here either, nor it is supposed to.

If all those fail... usually you'll read the resolution in some NTSB report.

> The first time asymetric thrust was used to pilot a plane (ailerons and elevators didn’t work), it was done without being in the books

Not sure if that was the first time, maybe first time in an _airliner_. Also in that particular incident, they had an experience commander, first officer and an instructor for that specific model of aircraft working together (the instructor was handling the thrust levers).

That was also a very extraordinary incident.

> flight crew performance was highly commendable and greatly exceeded reasonable expectations

> I wonder how this can work with computers

During the Columbia incident, the computers didn't know the wing was melting. But they detected a deviation from the flight path, which they tried to correct with control surfaces. When that failed, they added RCS thrusters too. The 'wing melting condition' wasn't programmed, but still they managed to use all available resources.

For more on how we could allow craft to 'intelligently' respond to failures, take a look at the Remote Agent, from NASA's DS-1 mission.

If a plane is unmanned, then, in case of malfunction, just safely smash it into the ground.

Handling mechanical failures and other in-flight emergencies are the tricky parts.

That depends on your definition of "tricky". If you mean something that requires human intelligence, I would say it's the complete opposite. More or less the first thing pilots start doing during an emergency is to follow lists, it's all very procedural and most failures have been predicted in advance, as well as what would need to be done to resolve them, or at least eliminate the immediate threat -- and if these procedures do not help, you are in a very bad place anyway. There are exceptions, of course.[1] I would say that the "tricky parts", as always, are very generally the situations that we did not predict and did not program for.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=099cHWSbAL8

There is one benefit of having people in the loop in that they come with a completely independent set of sensors for flying the aircraft. Look at the recent issues where the single sensor on the Boeing Maxs crash the aircraft. They're far from perfect for sure though(see the times people did the opposite and ignored the correct sensors causing a crash) but there's a definite benefit to having two completely different systems monitoring the data. It's unusual to see that level of safety differentiation, not only having multiple copies of a sensor to take measurements but multiple different designs and types of sensors measuring the same thing to avoid correlated failures.

> the single sensor

And this is the problem. We wouldn't have autonomous aircraft without sensor redundancies. Even pilots have multiple redundant instruments.

Having multiple instances of the same type of sensor doesn't necessary help a lot because they tend to have highly correlated failure modes. A human pilot contains entirely different sensor hardware which, although unreliable, tends to fail in different ways.

The tricky part is not decision making, but sensory awareness.

Takeoff and landing in rough conditions are tricky.

Takeoff and landing when the weather is fine is already a solved problem. So is taxiing.

https://newatlas.com/aircraft/airbus-attol-autonomous-airlin...

What's the advantages of a human compared to a computer for landing in rough weather? I would think it's a fairly logical problem. Wind is rotating the plane left, need to move the stick right. Wind is pulling the plane up, need to slow down or push the stick forward, etc. Need to make adjustments past safe levels or can't keep the plane level enough means it's too rough and the landing needs to be aborted. In my mind, it seems like the thing that's perfect for a computer. It can instantly take into consideration hundreds of precise measurements, sensors, and history, and make corrections for the precise amounts. A human has a much slower reaction time and can't make adjustments with the same degree of precision. I feel like a computer could correct a quick gust of wind before a person even has time to move their hand.

Compared to a self-driving car where you have all sorts of situations that require complex analysis, like trying to determine if that's a person lying on the highway or an empty garbage bag, this seems like it should be a walk in the park.

Autoland systems and humans have different limitations. Humans are limited by visibility, because we look out the window and control the final parts of the landing by what we see. The autopilot is limited by wind restrictions, because the control input rates of an airport are limited.

That limitation is there because the sensor inputs aren't as good as you think. Looking out the window reacts much faster to wind gusts than receiving a radio signal to determine runway line-up.

If you want to have a computer execute a full autoland in varying and gusting crosswind you'll probably need it to use cameras and computer vision, but then it becomes limited by the same visibility issues humans have.

You would think we wouldn’t have an endless string of 0-day exploits for operating systems as well but here we are, for the last 25 years. It should be a simple and logical problem as well.

An operating system has to be able to handle arbitrary data, arbitrary network traffic, and arbitrary user input, with the goal of enabling its operator to perform arbitrary computation.

That might be a slightly less tractable problem than controlling a fixed set of flight systems to maneuver an aircraft with a fixed set of degrees of freedom.

Definitely not to understate the complexity of flight systems software at all, but the analogy to operating systems seems unhelpful.

I think one of the key things computers aren't as good as people are is communication. There is a lot of info that a human can convey with a short sentence that a computer would have no chance of doing. The ability for a human to effectively communicate with ground, tower and other aircraft in inclement weather is key.

Computer systems can obviously also communicate over radio, and almost certainly at a higher information density than a human operator.

> To be fair, maintaining straight and level flight— i.e., not falling out of the sky— is the easiest part of flying an airplane.

Sure. But if it does happen, the self-driving airplane needs to have a landing plan that isn't "fall on a population center." It's not insurmountable, but does need to be baked in.

>But if it does happen, the self-driving airplane needs to have a landing plan that isn't "FALL* on a population center."*

Planes don't simply "fall" though, or more specifically it's not a limiting factor for autonomous flight because if they do Fall (due to total structural breakup) there is absolutely nothing a human pilot can do about it either. The more likely worst problem that is still within the realm of "anything can be done about it" is total engine failure (and with it the potential for failure of systems that depend upon engine power as well). Commercial jet aircraft tend to have glide ratios (how far they can go horizontally for each unit they drop vertically) of high single digits to low teens, though some go farther (the 747 for example is 17:1). So from 35000' say they'll typically be able to travel at least 60-110 miles (with some bonus for their initial velocity).

The power problem has also needed to be considered long since due to all the fly-by-wire systems, though for an autonomous cargo aircraft this may be another area worth a second look since some weight savings from normal life support might be well spent on additional redundancy.

As other posters have pointed out a fully autonomous aircraft just needs to aim for the most sparsely populated area of land or body of water. No need to worry about human life on the aircraft dramatically opens up potential ok ground areas. So a failure at cruising altitude that a piloted aircraft might survive anyway should leave a sizeable radius for an unpiloted aircraft to find a ditch point with low risk to human life. So ultimately while yeah sure, of course this should all be formalized, it shouldn't be a real blocker for this application.

So your aircraft is stricken and finds the nearest local field (putting aside commercial desires to protect the cargo too). The aircraft data tells it the field is empty but actually it’s filled with cattle/machinery/a circus/state fair/Trump boat flotilla or otherwise.

Isn't turbulence hard to predict? Could something cause an issue. I always assume pilot take over or at least monitor things more aggressively when the plane starts shaking a lot.

Turbulence doesn't mean loss of control. It's just rough air for a bit, and computers can manage through it. Modern passenger/cargo planes are designed to be naturally stable (positive static stability) in flight so that disturbances are dampened out.

Bigger issues like bad weather and other traffic would likely be programmed well in advance rather than leave that to real-time decisions.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that most pilot intervention for turbulence was for passenger comfort. If your cargo is secured properly, you should be able to fly through rougher stuff and navigate around the real bad weather that's easier to detect.

Avoiding icing situations (i.e. thunderstorms) is also important, so route planning and revision is too.

You wouldn't think twice about someone driving that exact same package 3000 km though right?

Planes simply don't fall on people even in worst case scenarios.

Losing power is actually what every meat pilot trains for.

In general you're right, planes falling on people is rare, but IIRC sadly one person on the ground died when the Airbus flight PK8303 flight crashed this year in Karachi; some others were injured and most people on the flight were killed.