I am not sure if I was proposing the concept in the sense of suggesting commercial aviation should go in that direction. I was noting that there is a clear argument for 4 out of the 6 accidents I mentioned that the state of the art in control systems can do, now, what those airplanes apparently did not do under pilot control. And maybe for all 6, depending on what we find out. I suspect this argument will be supported if one looks further back as well. And if the argument is out there to be made, then someone will use it to say we should go that route. I don't know if that someone would be me.
I see not only significant regulatory hindrances to realisation, but also significant technical and procedural hindrances.
First, technical. Such aircraft control systems must be shown to be reliable and fail-safe, and current kit is not so designed. Think of Turkish, whose AT was fed data from just one RA, and RAs are known to fail relatively often, compared with other avionics. We are a ways away from thorough fail-safe design through and through. And that is a prerequisite. No more map-shifts. And so on.
Second, procedural. In busy TMAs, the entire traffic control is predicated on flexibility, in heading, altitude, and airspeed when sequenced on final. Switching to pre-programmed full automation will require a massive system requirements change, and I am not sure anyone yet knows how it could be done, even the theory of it.
I don't know which of these would prove the bigger challenge.
I agree that it might make more sense to devise an appropriate approach to RWY 12 at Islamabad rather than CTL from RWY 30. If one wishes to turn that into a general argument that one doesn't do CTL's on full automatics, that might well be a negotiating point in a step change to full automatics. But if the response to that by some parties is to continue to allow hand-flown CTL's, then we would not have advanced from the current situation. If one switches to full automatics, one wants to do so especially for the demonstrably more risky procedures, I would think.
There are a lot of details, and it will take a lot of work and a lot of time, if we go that route.
PBL