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A comment on Germanwings Tragedy: How to protect against mentally ill pilots?. Parent comment

Re:Germanwings Tragedy: How to protect against mentally ill ... by will_asouka on Saturday March 28, 2015 @09:33AM (#9281430)
The utility of autopilot to a pilot is comparable to that of cruise control to a driver, it takes away some of the drudgery. It is not robust enough to be unmonitored by a human. It can not make the many decisions that arise every day in aviation, such as if and how to avoid a thunderstorm.

Autoland needs ground equipment that is expensive to install and has stringent requirements on the surrounding topography that means many airports can not install it. It also takes 2 people's full attention to make the autoland happen in a consistently safe manner, it's not a case of pressing the LAND button and sitting back sipping tea. This video shows a bit of that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMydKAcqKCg

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Re:Germanwings Tragedy: How to protect against mentally ill ... by moe on Saturday March 28, 2015 @10:18AM (#9281552)
It is not robust enough to be unmonitored by a human.

I'm no aviation expert, but isn't that only because the systems in civilian aircraft are decades old?

The state of the art in military drones seems to be autonomous landings on aircraft carriers[1]. The safety requirements for an Airliner are of course much higher than for an UAV, but the underlying technologies seem to be rather mature already.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/10/4511476/autonomous-drone-f...

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