JuggleDan: Yes, this is why such systems aren't common yet
What is beasic airmanship for any of us isn't that basic things for a computer, but it is getting feasible...
But this is why advancement we seen in last decades opens up new possibilities. I think in middle of 1990s the costs and size (and power and cooling requirements) of an "1 GFLOPS computer" would be make it pretty hard to imagine how that much computing power would be used on an aircraft. Now you can buy a TESLA S1070 system with... Which is 4096 GFLOPS. It is compact, no special power / cooling requirements, safe.
Should I speak about software? I doubt if use of
SNNs would be possible / practical about 10 years ago. Just as an example, because we are speaking about "perception" and what our computers can detect about the weather.
We need to analyze a lot of data to make the system reliable, and extensive testing? It would be more useful than SETI@Home, but when concept of smart cockpit, etc. was designed, such options weren't a possibility
How feedback is possible if we keep a sidestick is also very different now.