Ian W,
I see what you mean now. When I fly my drone Andy loose signal my drone will either autonomously fly back to me, hover or make an automatic decent in emergency conditions. This is what I think you are talking about. My drone is not large but this can relate for other larger drones. If my battery goes bellow 10% the drone will fly back And allow me to take control when it has calculated the minimum distance needed to land and if it’s no longer ctritical. This is very good and all but this is fairly simple autopilot. It follows its gps to the takeoff point using altitude from where it took off and will fly above my minimum set altitude however it will not avoid obstacles (so,e drones will do that.) I can also turn on the auto land feature if I wish however for more hard landings e.g close proximity to obstacles I have to land as it is not intelligent. This will work on small recreational drones and air taxis however all air taxis have parachutes and are like a slightly more developed autopilot following Pre established routes as they are short distances. This is different to large jet commercial flying. It’s like having a jet ski that follows a route via gps and avoids shallow water and rocks using sonar and cameras. Compare that to a large cruise ship where it’s a very different type of handling etc. Autopilot is different to AI. Autopilot is programmed by pilots and has a minor level of intelligence to sustain flight. When there is a storm unless told to do so it will not avoid it. In order to just make th AI to fly an airliner it will have to cover EVERY possible scenario and know all the runways and approaches etc. I’m not sure as to how they’re going to make this by making AI programmed to fly planes or just by having deep AI to act like a pilot would. Either way I dislike AI for many reasons (other than flying.) But that’s a bit of topic.
I read the EASA regulations and they’re on about aircraft not with a pilot on board, but a controller on the ground and does not mention air fart with no human interaction at all, they’re supporting drones. Not as the media calls “robot piloted planes.”
Also another point I forgot to add is Eurymenko got fired as Airbus believed he was pushing innovation to single pilot operations/autonomy to fast. It shows how Airbus don’t believe we have the technology to do it yet as well as the time it will take to do this will be longer than he proposed. As well as Boeing also said they’re working on the “building blocks” of this technology INCASE WE NEED IT. It’s still not even certain if we will have, although most likely at some point in this century and certainly in the next.