Not if the 100-year history of autopilot for airplanes is any indication. Planes can fly themselves—but only with two people in the cockpit.
Not if the 100-year history of autopilot for airplanes is any indication. Planes can fly themselves—but only with two people in the cockpit.
At a competition for the “most practicable safety device” in 1914, Brooklyn pilot Lawrence Sperry awed spectators in Bezons, France, when he stood up in the cockpit with both hands in the air mid-flight and asked his mechanic to crawl onto the wing. “The man did so, yet he had no more desire to die than you or I have,” read commentary from the New York Times. “Nothing happened.”
