> It's trivially easy to fly a plane in straight level flight, to the extent that you don't actually need any automation at all to do it. You simply trim the aircraft to fly in the attitude

That seemingly shifts the difficulty from the autopilot to the airframe. But that’s not actually good enough, it doesn’t keep an aircraft flying when it’s missing a large chunk of wing for example. https://taskandpurpose.com/tech-tactics/1983-negev-mid-air-c...

Instead, you’re talking about the happy path and if we accept the happy path as enough there’s the weekend equivalents of self driving cars built using minimal effort, however being production worthy is about more than being occasionally useful.

Autopilot is difficult because you need to do several things well or people will defiantly die. Self driving cars are far more forgiving of occasional mistakes but again it’s the or people die bits that makes it difficult. Tesla isn’t actually ahead of the game, they are just willing to take more risks with their customers and the general public’s lives.