[philistine]

> keep heading, speed, and altitude, they won’t do much anything else

That is absolutely not true. A plane on autopilot can land itself except for applying the brakes.

[seanmcdirmid]

Autolanders are separate systems from autopilots, and there are definitely planes in production today with autopilots (pretty universal) and no autolanders (like almost all Cessnas, you need the garmin auto land system, and it’s only for emergencies). Autopilots have been a thing since the 1920s, when they were just a rope tied to a stick, they definitely didn’t do auto landing back then.

If you are trying to claim that all autopilots come with auto landers, thats absolutely not true. Even most, and again, they are always separate systems even if the auto lander can access the same servos used by the autopilot. Additionally, autolanders, unlike the autopilot, require the runways to support it (well, the ones used on commercial airplanes where it’s used sometimes in low visibility situations).

I really think only a few people on HN don’t get that autopilots are actually very much simple systems that have been around forever and do one thing well (keep the plane going in one direction at a specific altitude and speed).