What I described is most emphatically NOT being a passenger. It's
being a driver.

Fair enough - you didn't mention an autopilot. But I can't concieve of
one of these being marketed without one. Lots of present day pilots
swear by George already.

Why shouldn't we make it that simple?
It would give us the advantage of numbers, and that of course would
reduce costs, regulation, etc.

Don't confuse "simple" with "simplistic". It would most certainly NOT
reduce regulation; if anything with all the influx of barely trained
drivers climbing to ten thousand in some light midwinter rain, I
anticipate lots of new regulations, bringing flying down to the least
common denomenator. No, it's not anywhere near there now.

I most emphatically disagree that weather will not be a problem. No
matter what you do, you are still being held aloft on a blast of air by
a piece of something whose shape matters a lot.

Every plane would have the
equivalent of a Garmin 396 (its failure would be considered an
emergency condition warranting a call to ATC for emergency handling)

1: Even if they don't fail much, with lots of them out there, they will
fail often enough to make ATC into AAA.

2: Even if they never fail, I don't see the average joe who can't
program their VCR making head or tail out of what it does when it dishes
out an "interface surprise", especially as it gets a tad bumpy up there
and they are threading their way through the frowny faces on the moving map.

Jose
--
Quantum Mechanics is like this: God =does= play dice with the universe,
except there's no God, and there's no dice. And maybe there's no universe.
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