Quote:
Originally Posted by Dutch101
If a hardware failure interferes with the keep flying bit of a plane then it crashes with or without a pilot. So for a computer landing the plane after a mechanical failure is just as hard as parking the car in a safe spot at the side of the road. We just look at it differently because the impact of getting of the road in a ditch is a lot lower than dropping out of the sky.
The bolded is just wrong.
A simple example to make my point more concrete: Driverless car software can deal with a flat tire, overheating engine, loss of hydraulic fluid, etc. by stopping the car and calling for help. A pilotless plane needs to have software that deals with engine failures, loss of instruments, combinations of failures, etc. that don't involve just shutting the plane down.
I find this derail kind of annoying, so I guess I'll leave it at that.