This is what's so annoying about talking to people who very obviously do not have a sufficient common frame of reference and then go on pontificating about how easy to solve and narrow in scope all remaining problems are. It's condescending, and it's stupid.

It sounds like you think most commercial aviation flights in the U.S. autoland. Almost none of them do. Most flights are landed by pilots. Some portion of the approach is done by autopilot but the landing is done by a pilot. Many airports in the country have mandatory noise abatement. Are you aware that ILS approaches are incompatible with noise abatement? These approaches and landings are hand flown in visual conditions. So your plane can't just use instrument landings designed for bad weather flying. You have to R&D a whole new approach to landing method that's noise abatement compatible, to be able to have pilotless planes doing autolandings. Unsolved problem. Seems significant research related to me, not merely an engineering problem.

Why will it take orders of magnitude greater resources and time to solve the auto driving problem, and yet all such research problems for auto flying are solved? What data do you have that causes you to conclude that one is solved and the other is far from solved? What's the difference in cognition and judgement requirements between the two? What's the relevance of experience? Why do you suppose there are so much more substantial knowledge and experience requirements in pilot certification than driver licensing? Why does it take so long to learn how to become an airline transport pilot? Why have gradations of certification? If it's so much simpler of a system to automate as you state, then it should be a simpler system for a human to learn and just plug into, than learning to drive. But it's the exact opposite, it's much more complex than driving, despite automation.

And yet you're saying no, it's simpler and solved, to just replace all of that cognition and judgement with computers and automation. No more research required, just go built it, according to you. Strikes me as a lot of hubris.

Additionally, air traffic controllers are part of this cognitive and judging process of making planes move around. They train for years as well. But despite every flight requiring two human brains in flight, and part of a human brain involved on the ground, you're claiming that driving cars is more cognitively complicated to automate. Why? What's the basis? A single person does this in a car, and they almost always can multitask totally unrelated things like listening to music, or conversing with passengers.

CAT III landings do not incluce runway egress. Unsolved problem to do without a pilot. Sounds like massive R&D is needed, not just engineering or it'd already be automated.

Autopilots don't do turbulence or icing conditions well. They're disabled in severe cases, and such conditions aren't always predictable or even known until the moment they're encountered. Sounds like an R&D problem, not just an engineering problem. Landing on ice, snow, and heavy rain? Pilots do that by hand, not autopilots. AGain, more R&D needed, not just engineering. For reasons unknown you want us to believe that for planes these are solved problems, or easily solved problems, while identical situations for autonomous cars are still difficult unsolved problems. Why? Sounds like you don't know what you're talking about.

The term autopilot is idiotic. The most sophisticated autopilot follows a defined path, the path is defined by a pilot. It effectively maintains altitude, heading, and speed. That's it. There is no code that enables the autopilot to think like a pilot and redefine the path, which happens in all flights. Clearance changes are common place for many reasons. So you need to design a pilotless version of the current ATC to pilot to autopilot carrier pigeon system. Is it an engineering problem? Or a research problem? Seems like both to me because there's no plan for it right now, no design.

Why is ADS-B essential? It's merely scaled out secondary radar. It solves a very vertical problem. It doesn't have sufficient precision to help with landing. It says nothing about how to utilize this information. Humans do that. Seems to me it's a research problem to create an AI that replaces the evaluation and judgement of a pilot, not just engineering.

sigh

Gusty takeoffs and landings? Autopilots don't do that right now. Sounds like a research problem, not an engineering one.

Emergency procedures? This is 100% the domain of human pilots right now. Code that for the pilotless aircraft. Seems R&D related, not merely an engineering task.

The autopilot needs to meet the functional equivalent of competency for the applicable parts of pilot certification in FAR 61. It needs to be able to conform with all or at least some substantial subset of aviation regulations FAR 91, 135, and 121 as right now a huge amount of this conformance is done by pilots. Otherwise, you're redesigning the entire aviation system from the ground up. Either way this sounds to me like a massive research problem, not just an engineering problem.

This list goes on and I pretty much think you're an idiot, not because you're ignorant, but because you're ignorant, deny it, and then handwave bullshit that all the seriousl research problems are solved and all that remains is building things. It's just - it's really stupid and condescending.