Airplanes are substantially more complicated machines than cars, and are also pushed much further in their performance envelope than cars.
Cars also enjoy much safer failure modes than aircraft - if a catastrophic failure occurs in all likelihood you can pull the car over to a stop without issue. When a catastrophic failure occurs in an aircraft's controls it hits the ground and everybody dies.
We're not even quite there yet for self-driving cars, though we are close - and that is a problem orders of magnitude easier than fully-competent autopilots.
We already have the technology to take off, fly, and land planes in the Happy Case. But the devil is really in the unhappy cases.
Nobody is saying we won't ever have full autopilots - but that we are very, very far away from such a capability, and simply throwing engineers at the problem is unlikely to give you the solution substantially faster. When you're pushing the absolute edges of scientific and engineering knowledge progress does not correlate strongly with workforce.
Cars also enjoy much safer failure modes than aircraft - if a catastrophic failure occurs in all likelihood you can pull the car over to a stop without issue. When a catastrophic failure occurs in an aircraft's controls it hits the ground and everybody dies.
We're not even quite there yet for self-driving cars, though we are close - and that is a problem orders of magnitude easier than fully-competent autopilots.
We already have the technology to take off, fly, and land planes in the Happy Case. But the devil is really in the unhappy cases.
Nobody is saying we won't ever have full autopilots - but that we are very, very far away from such a capability, and simply throwing engineers at the problem is unlikely to give you the solution substantially faster. When you're pushing the absolute edges of scientific and engineering knowledge progress does not correlate strongly with workforce.