@spiritplumber, I can only assume you've never flown a plane or used a flight simulator (MS Flight will do).
Today's airliners are incredibly advanced. In the 60's they didn't have Terrain Collision Avoidance. Try to fly the plane into a hill and alarms go off and tell you how rapidly to ascent. They didn't have automated traffic collision avoidance (TCAS). Fly two planes at each other and it tells one pilot to dive, the other to climb and how much. They didn't have stick shakers which alert the pilot if the plane is near stalling, before it stalls, so they know to gain air speed to prevent the stall.
Those are the basic standards. Today any aircraft worth it's salt has a full Doppler weather radar to avoid storms, hail and down drafts. Today the entire flight path is computer calculated and tracked from end to end. Just turn on auto pilot or keep the indicators aligned on your artificial horizon and you'll get where you're going. No one gets lost these days without trying. I've not going to even start on CatII and CatIII landings too. Today planes can land in 0, that right 0, visibility.
> if it wasn't airliner stuff would all be automatic
But let's keep going. Ever heard of AutoLand? Yep, plane can land itself. Ever heard of AutoFlare? Yep, plane will tilt back at just the right angle for a pillow soft touch down. Ever heard of AutoThrottle? No need to keep adjusting those engines, plane takes care of that, just tell it where you want to go. Frankly, pilots rarely do much more than tell the plane what it should do. Want to go to flight level 380? Just turn the knob to 38000ft, set the desired vertical speed rate and the plane will adjust the throttles, ailerons and trim itself out at 38000ft for you. Want to go to heading 245? Just dial in 245 degrees the plane will take your speed into consideration and speed up just enough to keep everything constant through the curve.
Funny thing about automation though is not getting everything automated, but keeping pilots from getting stale because too much is automated. Take the Asiana flight, it's what we call Controlled Flight into Terrain. Not a thing wrong with that 777 but the pilot.
We're worlds away from the 1960's and the 777 is among the most sophisticated and advanced craft in the world. Far more advanced than even our spacecraft of the 1960's.
But TCAS and GPS-aware Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System (EGPWS) are 90s, and automation vs maintaining flying skill is definitely a major challenge.
Indeed Autoland started deployment in the 60's, though not in a pervasive sense until decades later. Point on that was that we've had a lot of automation for in aircraft for some time. :)
