About whether AI could fly a crippled aircraft better than human pilots.
Has this happened?
Yes 12 (9%)Not sure 67 (52%)No 50 (39%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether AI could fly a crippled aircraft better than human pilots.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
It's hard, but it's a very measurable problem.
You randomly deform the airframe in a physics simulator, then get a real pilot to try to fly the simulated damaged airframe to the nearest airport.
You then get an AI to try doing the same.
As soon as the AI manages to get to the airport more often than the human, the tech will save lives, on average.
My guess is a PhD student could come up with an AI passing the above test inside a year. Yet aviation standards are stringent enough AI will be decades away from production use, if ever.