General Aviation is in totally different situation than what Tesla is doing. GA is so over-regulated that we're flying decades old small planes as it is financially not feasible to bring something new to market and have it certified. Progress is mostly done on experimental/ultra-light planes. Those suffers similar issue as they are limited to certain weight and even feasible safety features often can't be added due to weight limits. On the other side of safety spectrum you have Tesla that is pushing something-like-autonomous-driving software to common people to try out on real streets.

The majority of those aviation rules and regulations are written in blood. While unfortunate, it's not surprising to me that automated vehicles may follow the same path. Regulators are rarely forward thinking.

The problem isn't that regulators cannot be proactive.

The problem is that no one wants to be regulated. Just look at crypto, people love the lack of regulation. However, once there is a crash or enough people get scammed, there will be demand for regulations to prevent that from happening again.

Weight limits, and then electrics. A lot of GA planes have multiple things - lights + radios, wired into the same circuit because there's not enough circuits to keep them all separate.

This is a very ironic statement to be making given the subject and the recent affairs with Boeings software updates.

If cars had the same death rate per mile as airplanes, tens of thousands of lives would be saved every year in the US alone.

To first order, planes only crash when they're landing or taking off.

Cars crash in pretty much every situation. Fatal incidents are more clumped but no where near as much as planes.

I vaguely recall that the risks are closer than you'd expect when going by hours of flight, rather than distance. I'm not finding the numbers right now though.

In https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/planecrash/risky.html I did find some older numbers. For commercial carries, it was 1.9 deaths per vehicle mile instead of 1.3.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/planecrash/risk-01.html (99 through 03)

However, private planes are more risky and don't seem to be included in those numbers.

Pithey comment that is true based on current usage patterns, but a total lie when everyone starts flying to work or the grocery store... and they're the pilot.

Agreed, the human pilot is the problem. The sooner we can remove them from the situation, the more lives will be saved

If drivers got the same training and stuck to the same rules as airline pilots, we'd have a lot less accidents. Most accidents [citation needed] are still caused by reckless driving; inattentiveness (exacerbated by driving assistance), speeding, drunk driving, aggressive driving, etc.

Moving to automatic driving will probably be a thing long term, but for the short term, it's a human problem. If only people were held more accountable for driving badly.

Don't worry, that will be enabled at a later date. Mid-Atlantic.

Even the 737 MAX was very safe though. That's why it was notable: it was a genuine safety regression with a clear root cause in an industry that had been getting steadily and inexorably safer for decades and decades.

Sure. It's a plane that never crashed in the entire Western Hemisphere and Europe. Among "unsafe" things that's pretty good.