The old and oft-disproved story was everyone but Columbus thought the world was flat and only he knew you could get to India going the "wrong way", but did not know the Americas were in the way and thought he got to India and thus called the natives "Indians". Sailors has known the planet was round for a long time and the diameter was even calculated by ancient Greeks to a pretty good level of accuracy. * I am not entirely clear on if Columbus and his crew thought the Bahamas were islands lying WAY offshore of India or what, but they did call the locals Indians and then started killing or enslaving them, so maybe the real Indians were lucky Panama was in the way.

^THIS *15 years ago* I took a friend flying and he said it looked boring, I hardly touched the controls. The plane did 95% of the work, I did the first 5 minutes and the last 10 minutes. That is with gear 2 decades old.

I let the plane fly itself all the time. I am still in it, but if I set the autopilot to fly 200 degrees magnetic, I expect it to keep doing that, not suddenly decide to go to Denver because fuel is on sale there or something. "AI" in an airplane would HAVE to mean it is doing something involving controlling the airplane or it would just be AI on a laptop in the cockpit for making fake cat videos on boring cruise segments, which we actually already can do. What do you think it will be doing? Anything at all it does that controls the airplane in any way will be something by definition unpredictable and liable to do bad things.

Somehow SD dumped half the sentence. I cannot imagine anything I want less in an airplane than "AI" that will do some random thing it thinks is a good idea rather than what I expect it to do.

I am a pilot. I cannot imagine anything I want less in an airplane than "AI" that will do rather than what I expect it to do. We ALREADY have issues with corner cases in regular software for airplanes that have killed people, but at least once discovered they can be fixed because they will happen consistently.

The really cool thing about parrots is some of them learn to understand what they are saying, not just mimic sounds. Long ago we taught a macaw to say "fukfukfuk-fukOFF" with a Foghorn Leghorn accent. He would use it when he was annoyed LOL.

I have high hopes for this, I loved the originals!

If I confiscate the money from rich people and then eat them, between the extra money and not having to buy dinner I can buy a whole tank of gas and fly some more! Win Win * seriously, if you don't like airplanes, feel free to not buy one or ride on one. Americans are always slagged off as provincial morons who don't even have a passport, but then try and go visit some other country and we are evil for using airplanes.

I assume you do not own an airplane nor work for an airline. I can assure you there is plenty of consequence to your wallet when you refuel it. Airlines that randomly send their planes around for no reason are soon bankrupt. People not among the 1%ers who buy gas hog airplanes and fly around in circles get their credit cards taken away by their wived pretty quickly too. Also do not assume that the airplane is wasting fuel. The figure you want is "seat MPG". My airplane gets about 20 MPG and holds 2 people, so the seat MPG is 40. I can fly in a straight line to the beach and use a lot less gas than driving there which is not close to a straight line. A 737 gets around 0.5 MPG. That may sound bad, and it is if it is your private airplane, but split among 100-140 people or so it is more efficient than driving a car by yourself.

ROFLMAO doesn't even begin to cove this!

It is kind of a soft extortion we learned about in aviation law class, but it applies to the FCC as well as the FAA. You very much can appeal a fine or other punishment until you are in a federal court and not dealing with an ALJ any more. The feds will try to crush you there if they can pour encourager les autres.

Thanks! I can't stand liquid glass, why did someone think this is a good idea?

If you ever fly through and above fog, it is very evident it is a cloud at ground level probably a few hundred feet thick.

There is one. My mother was over and picked what looked like a generic Hallmark and it was for much of it. Suddenly it veers off course with the main male character hugging the female lead and saying "Feel that! This is a hard as a man gets" and later a couple old ladies in town try to get him to whip it out, saying "Come on, we want to see the magic ding-a-ling". My wife and I were ROFLMAO x1000 and my mother was looking like she wanted to hide under the couch.

They will be lucky to be able to fly an airplane a decade from now. OTOH the moon is probably a better place for a Russian reactor than anywhere on this planet, so there is that.