>It seems like you are not well versed in ai.

Not especially. I audited a course as an undergrad, and hardly remember anything from it now, but I have a layman's understanding of the basics.

>There was a debate about whether "hand engineering" vs "dumb simple algo's" would get results. Dumb algo's won.

There are design tasks for which "algorithms" are better suited, and there are design tasks where experienced human engineers still do far, far better. The statement "Dumb algo's won" is certainly true for some applications, but not all.

>Your mentioning of MTI and STAP, and how difficult radar design is etc. etc.,

Now it's my turn: you clearly are not well versed in aviation or in radar principles. Not every problem can be magically solved by throwing AI at it. Radar theory is well established, and the equations are well known. Unfortunately, they are hard equations to solve: determining the location of an object using radar involves some complicated math with a lot of variables, and the only way to solve those equations is to chew your way through them. You can simplify them, but then you have to accept increased errors from the terms you throw out.

Where "algorithms" come into play is tracking, and depending on how you define AI, radar engineers have been using AI since the invention of the first automated tracker. Even the very best automated trackers in existance today are not nearly as good as an experienced operator looking at raw returns. Someday that will probably change, but that day is still many years away.

>...makes me think you aero guys are still in hand-engineering land.

As I said before, you're making a huge mistake by lumping "you aero guys" into a single group. "Aeronautical engineering" is really "every other kind of engineering, applied to aviation." When I was in grad school, one of my buddies' thesis was pure AI: he developed a learning algorithm for choosing the optimum path for a jet to taxi around a crowded flight deck, using DGPS as the only position source. Another guy combined machine learning with CFD in an attempt to design better supersonic lifting surfaces (the results were not good, but his thesis was still a "success" in the sense that he expanded human knowledge and the general concept showed promise). There are some applications where AI is the way to go, and there are some applications where what you derisively call "hand engineering" is infinitely superior.

>I will offer another example. Why did the aerospace dudes not be able to autonomously fly a helicopter. in 2004, andrew ng decided to tackle this. He completely ignored any previous work, just using a dumb algo (reinforcement learning) and laptop managed to get amazing autonomous performance out it. Why was it him (ai researcher), and not people from the field of flying.

Time for a history lesson:

The Navy deployed the first effective autonomous rotorcraft in the 1960s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_Anti-Submarine_Helicopter

So the "aerospace dudes" were "able to autonomously fly a helicopter" before Andrew Ng was born, and they did it using "hand engineering."

Not autonomous enough for you? Firescout flew autonomously four years before Andrew Ng flew his helicotper autonomously: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firescout

Firescout was also developed by "people from the field of flying."