Yes, the public holds misconceptions about how much the autopilot on a plane does. But some of their beliefs are accurate, and would be dangerous when extended to a car: like how, when the plane AP is engaged, you don’t need sub-second reaction times for possible obstacles. You do need that in a Tesla.
Fairly sure that you do need that for autoland, to engage TO/GA (for go-around) and take control. Most other cases, AP disengagement indeed means "now we think about what next".
At which point you're arguing semantics: "it's not the short landing that kills you, it's the impact into whatever you hit there!" You're describing Asiana Airlines 214, whose crash killed 3.
No I'm saying the pilot flying an aircraft correctly configured for autoland in which the autoland system encounters a fault does not require subsecond reaction times to avoid a crash.
Asiana Airlines Flight 214 is irrelevant because (1) it was not correctly configured for approach, (2) the autopilot was switched off over a minute before the crash, and (3) the autopilot did not fail.
The parent of this thread was an argument over whether a aircraft flying on autopilot needs the pilot monitoring it to have subsecond reaction times to avoid a crash. It doesn't.
