Can Claude Fly a Plane?

https://so.long.thanks.fish/can-claude-fly-a-plane/

by casi • 3 months ago

107 96 3 months ago

so.long.thanks.fish

thewhitetulip3• 3 months ago

Humans can also fly. Once.

Findecanor• 3 months ago

Douglas Adams formulated how it would be possible for a human to fly continuously, though.

http://extremelysmart.com/humor/howtofly.php

thewhitetulip3• 3 months ago

I have the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy but I never got around to reading it. I might have to read it next

travisgriggs• 3 months ago

The bit in the middle where it decides to make its control loop be pure P(roportional), presumably dropping the I and D parts, is interesting to me. Seems like a poor choice.

I try to fly about once a week, I’ve never really tried to self analyze what my inputs are for what I do. My hunch is that there’s quite a bit of I(ntegral) damping I do to avoid over correcting, but also quite a bit of D(erivative) adjustments I do, especially on approach, in order to “skate to the puck”. Density going to have to take it up with some flight buddies. OR maybe those with drone software control loop experience can weigh in?

aetherspawn• 3 months ago

Dumping the I part instead of just tuning it properly is kind of an insane thing to do … speaking as an actual controls engineer

gbgarbeb• 3 months ago

"Actual controls engineers" use PD loops (no I) all the time.

userbinator• 3 months ago

The real question is, can it keep the plane in one piece?

thewhitetulip3• 3 months ago

And which human will fly in an llm operated plane?!

ccozan• 3 months ago

Please welcome aboard of Airthropic Lines!

Markoff2• 3 months ago

I am sure some Ryanair customers would risk it for good price.

hdgvhicv• 3 months ago

Keeping a plane on the ground seems easy enough. Keeping in the air in one place would be impossible. Keeping any place in the air is only temporary.

morpheuskafka• 3 months ago

Surely at least part of the issue here is that even an LLM operates in two digit tokens per second, not to mention extra tokens for "thinking/reasoning" mode, while a real autopilot probably has response times in tens of milliseconds. Plus the network latency vs a local LLM.

webprofusion• 3 months ago

"Can I Get Claude to Fly A Plane" isn't the same thing. Interesting though, would be a good test for different models but it relies on the test harness being good enough that a human could also use the same info to achieve the required outcome. e.g. if latency of input/output is too slow then nobody could do it.

est• 3 months ago

main issue seemed to be delay from what it saw with screenshots and api data and changing course.

This is where I think Taalas-style hardware AI may dominate in the future, especially for vehicle/plane autopilot, even it can't update weights. But determinism is actually a good thing.

sigmoid10• 3 months ago

This is a limitation of LLM i/o which historically is a bit slow due to these sequential user vs assistant chat prompt formats they still train on. But in principle nothing stops you from feeding/retrieving realtime full duplex input/output from a transformer architecture. It will just get slower as you scale to billions or even trillions of parameters, to the point where running it in the cloud might offer faster end-to-end actions than running it locally. What I could imagine is a small local model running everyday tasks and a big remote model tuning in for messy situations where a remote human might have to take over otherwise.

leptons• 3 months ago

Does Claude know the plane isn't at the car wash?

mihaaly• 3 months ago

Friend participating in some sort of simulated glider tournament trained a neural network to fly one some way (don't ask details). I recall rules were changed to ban such, not because of him.

Using Claude sounds overkill and unfit the same time.

bottlepalm• 3 months ago

AI being able to quickly react to real time video input is the next thing. Computer use right now is painfully slow working off a slow screenshot/command loop.

operatingthetan• 3 months ago

We already have advanced autopilots that can fly commercial airliners. We just don't trust them enough to not have human pilots. I would trust the autopilot more than freaking Claude. We already do, every day.

dewey• 3 months ago

I don't think anyone is suggesting we should do that...but it's still a fun project to play around with?

codingconstable• 3 months ago

Agreed. I think thats a really fun way to test out Claude's ability to perform an abstract task it's probably not trained on, was nice to read

freedomben• 3 months ago

yeah, I think GP misunderstood the nature of a thing like this. It's what hackers do, we play with things. Nobody is suggesting we replace the pilots in real planes with claude, certainly not OP

Ekaros• 3 months ago

I think we can trust them to not have human pilots. It is just that having human in loop is very useful in not that rare scenarios. Say airfield has too much wind or fog or another plane has crashed on all runways... Someone needs to make decision what to do next. Or when there is some system failure not thought about.

And well if they are there they might as well fly for practise.

And no. I would not allow LLM in to the loop of making any decision involving actual flying part.

LiamPowell2• 3 months ago

There's also the issue that when something goes wrong, many people will never trust an autopilot again. Just look at how people have reacted to a Waymo running over a cat in a scenario where most humans would have made the same error. There's now many people calling for self-driving cars to never be allowed on roads and citing that one incident.

ekianjo2• 3 months ago

We just don't trust them enough to not have human pilots

never mind that most crashes are caused by humans, very rarely by technical issues going amok

stnikolauswagne9• 3 months ago

never mind that most crashes are caused by humans, very rarely by technical issues going amok

Because humans are the fallback for all the scenarios that the tech cannot reliably cover. And my intuition says that the tech around planes is so heavily audited that only things that work with 99.999...% accuracy work will be left to tech.

reeredfdfdf• 3 months ago

Still those technological issues do happen, and in those situations it's good to have a human pilot in control. See for example Qantas Flight 72 - the autopilot thought aircraft was stalling, and sent the plane into a dive. It could have ended up very badly without human supervision.

Mawr2• 3 months ago

That's so incredibly reductive, that I'd go ahead and call it plain wrong.

"Caused by a human" is the lowest tier, first base human instinct analysis of any accident, and as such, unless proven otherwise, can be discarded out of hand.

It comes down to: if a human mistake is capable of causing an accident, your system is badly designed because it assumes a part of the system known to be unreliable (a human) is always reliable.

The whole trick is designing systems that are safe despite humans being in the loop. Then you get to benefit from the advantages humans bring over machines without suffering the downsides.

boring-human• 3 months ago

We just don't trust them enough to not have human pilots.

Much of the value of a human crew is as an implicit dogfooding warranty for the passengers. If it wasn't safe to fly, the pilots wouldn't risk it day after day.

To think of it, it'd be nice if they posted anonymized third-party psych evaluations of the cockpit crew on the wall by the restrooms. The cabin crew would probably appreciate that too.

sandworm1012• 3 months ago

There are soooo many pilot decisions that AI is nowhere near making. Managing a flight is more than flying. It is about making safety decisions during crisis, from deciding when to abort an approach to deciding when to eject a passenger. Sure, someone on the ground could make many of those decisions, but i prefer such things be decided by someone with literal skin in the game, not a beancounter or lawyer in an office

zenmac• 3 months ago

It would be interesting to see if Claude can land and take off. Don't think the autopilot can do that yet.

LiamPowell2• 3 months ago

Autopilots can. Both on airliners and small planes, although only landing on the latter as far as I know and it's only meant for emergencies. Airbus ATTOL is probably the most interesting of these in that it's visual rather than ILS (note that no commercial airliners are using this).

delta_p_delta_x• 3 months ago

Don't think the autopilot can do that yet.

It absolutely can; it's called autoland[1]. In really bad visibility, pilots simply can't see the runway until too late, and most aerodromes which expect these conditions have some sort of autoland system installed. The most advanced ones will control every aspect of the plane from top-of-descent (TOD), flaps and throttle configuration, long and short final, gear down, flare, reverse thrust, and roll-out, all the way to a full stop on the runway. Zero pilot input needed.

And most of this was already available in the late 1970s. We have absolutely no need for LLM-based AI in aviation; traditional automation techniques have proven extremely powerful given how restricted the human domain of aviation already is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland

SR2Z• 3 months ago

Yeah, I think it's been technically possible to automate jetliners for a while now, but when a metal tube with hundreds of people in it develops a technical fault while moving 500+ mph there's no substitute for a pilot.

16bytes• 3 months ago

In aviation there's a saying, "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate" which describes the hierarchy of things to pay attention to while piloting an aircraft.

Autopilot can be thought of better as "auto-aviate". That is to say, if there is already a navigation plan, the aircraft can follow that plan. Simple autopilots just keep the wings level, others can hold an altitude and change heading. More sophisticated ones can change altitude or even fully land the plane.

All of those things, however, require people to manage the "Navigate" part. "Aviate" is a deterministically solved problem, at least in normal flight operations. As you point out we trust autopilots today, including on (nearly) every single commercial flight.

LLMs are a poor alternative to "aviate", but they could be part of a better flight management automation package. The parent article tries to use the LLM to aviate, with predictable results.

If paired with a capable auto-pilot (not the relatively basic one on that C-172), the LLM could figure out how to operate the FMS and take you from post take-off to final approach and aid in situational awareness.

Currently, I don't think there is a commercial solution for GA aircraft that could say, "Ok, I'm 20NM from KVNY, but there are three people ahead of me in the pattern, so I have to do a right 360 before descending and joining downwind on 34L".

Having an LLM propose that course of action and tell the autopilot to execute on it definitely would be an improvement to GA safety.

basfijneman• 3 months ago

If planes can fly autopilot I assume claude can make a pretty good flight plan. Not sure if claude can react in time if shit hits the fan.

"spawning 5 subagents"

dnnddidiej• 3 months ago

"Rate limited try again in 10 seconds"

otabdeveloper4• 3 months ago

Yes, but for a limited time only.

jmward01• 3 months ago

The question of 'can it fly' is clearly a 'yes, given a little bit of effort'. Flying isn't hard, autopilots have been around a long time. It is recognizing and dealing with things you didn't anticipate that is hard. I think it is more interesting to have 99% of flying done with automated systems but have an LLM focus on recognizing unanticipated situations and recovering or mitigating them.

stnikolauswagne9• 3 months ago

I think it is more interesting to have 99% of flying done with automated systems but have an LLM focus on recognizing unanticipated situations and recovering or mitigating them.

Seeing how Claude (or any current LLM) perform in even the most low-stake coding scenario I dont think I would ever set foot on a plane where the 1% of most risky scenarios are decided by one.

amelius5• 3 months ago

Using an LLM doesn't mean it has to take the final decision. You can also use it as a warning system.

KaiserPro2• 3 months ago

General LLMs I would say are uniquely bad at this sort of thing.

I mean if you have a stable plane, then it'll do alright, as it'll mostly fly straight and level (assuming correct trim) reacting to turbulence however, the sampling rate would probably too slow, so you'd end up with oscillations.

For recognising that you're in a shit situation, yeah, it'll probably do that fine, but won't be able to give the correct control inputs at the right time.

red_admiral• 3 months ago

Flying isn't hard

Most of the time. Sometimes you get a double bird strike when you've barely cleared the Hudson river, or similar.

progx• 3 months ago

Prepare for landing "rate limit exceeded" (Error 429)" ;-)

edu• 3 months ago

Besides the article, I think a big issue for this would be the speed of the input-decision-act loop as it should be pretty fast and Claude would introduce a lot of latency in it.

nairboon• 3 months ago

Let's hope you don't reach Claude's session limit during approach, while trying to correct a slightly too steep descent angle.

chha• 3 months ago

...or that the satellite network connection disconnects for some reason.

Markoff2• 3 months ago

I wouldn't really worry about flying, but more about taking off/landing.

Related from December 2025: Garmin Emergency Autoland deployed for the first time

https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/aviation-news/aviation-sa...

stinkbeetle• 3 months ago

Autoland has been used for 60 years and on much more complicated aircraft than that Beechcraft B200.

nnevod• 3 months ago

I suppose part of the problem with autolanding a small plane is that they have much less intertia and are much more susceptible to conditions.

Large planes are autolanded in normal conditions with oversight of qualified, capable and backed up operator, in harsh conditions they are not used, as far as I understand.

Autoland systems in small planes are emergency systems to land plane with disabled operator in any conditions generally acceptable for flying in that plane.

johntopia• 3 months ago

If there's a timeline where claude can actually fly a plane, then operating nuclear reactors can be possible as well.

blitzar• 3 months ago

Sky King managed it, no reason claude shouldnt be able to.

ramon156• 3 months ago

CRASHED #2, different cause. Plane was stable in a slow descent but between fly.py invocations (~20 sec gap while I logged and computed the next maneuver) there was no active controller. Plane kept descending under its last commanded controls until it hit terrain at 26 ft MSL, 1.7 nm short of the runway. Lesson: never leave the controller idle in flight

Gold

monour• 3 months ago

they say already used in some missiles which hit school at current war by mistake

vachina• 3 months ago

Give a stochastic text generator to physics. What can go wrong.

amelius5• 3 months ago

I see you are still in the stochastic parrot phase.

dist-epoch• 3 months ago

try using codex-5.3-spark, it has much faster inference, might be able to keep up. and maybe a specialized different openrouter model for visual parsing.

xuxu298• 3 months ago

haha, if can, would you dare to follow it? :D

rkagerer• 3 months ago

You could also use your forehead as a hammer, but it's likewise going to result in more pain than gain.

I wouldn't trust Claude to ride my bike, so I certainly wouldn't board its flight.

razorbeamz• 3 months ago

I'd imagine Claude is too slow to fly a plane above everything.

hansmayer2• 3 months ago

Mate, we don't trust it to write an email or the code it generates. Why should we trust it to fly a plane?

sneak• 3 months ago

Somebody, somewhere, is using it to decide who lives and who dies by bombs. Why not hook it up to a flight sim?

hansmayer2• 3 months ago

Sad, but true.

Paracompact• 3 months ago

As most others have pointed out, the goal from here wouldn't be to craft a custom harness so that Claude could technically fly a plane 100x worse than specialist autopilots. Instead, what would be more interesting is if Claude's executive control, response latency, and visual processing capabilities were improved in a task-agnostic way so that as an emergent property Claude became able to fly a plane.

It would still be better just to let autopilots do the work, because the point of the exercise isn't improved avionics. But it would be an honestly posed challenge for LLMs.

kqr• 3 months ago

Lots of people commenting seem to have not read the article. The author didn't hook Claude up directly with the controls, asking it to one-shot a successful flight.

The author tried getting Claude to develop an autopilot script while being able to observe the flight for nearly live feedback. It got three attempts, and did not manage autolanding. (There's a reason real autopilots do that assisted with ground-based aids.)

resiros• 3 months ago

I think you gave someone an idea for a new RL environment :) Probably it will be able to fly it in the next iteration.

nelox• 3 months ago

So Claude crashed because it was busy figuring out how to fly the plane?

alex_duf• 3 months ago

Claude uses the wrong modality to be a piloting model. Latency is critical, and outputting tokens in the hope they take the action at the right time is kinda bonkers.

You'd want all the data from the plane to be input neurons, and all the actions to be output neurons.

ikari_pl• 3 months ago

"Approaching for landing"

"500 Our Servers Are Experiencing High Load"

Nevin1901• 3 months ago

I wonder if using a model with a higher TOK/s would yield improvements, as the model will have faster feedback loops

teeray• 3 months ago

“Automation can lower the workload in some cases. But in other situations, using automation when it is not appropriate can increase one’s workload. A pilot has to know how to use a level of automation that is appropriate... Whether you’re flying by hand or using technology to help, you’re ultimately flying the airplane with your mind by developing and maintaining an accurate real-time mental model of your reality—the airplane, the environment, and the situation. The question is: How many different levels of technology do you want to place between your brain and the control surfaces?“[0]

—Sully Sullenberger

[0] Sully: My Search for What Really Matters. p. 188

penguin_booze• 3 months ago

I hope vibe coding enthsiasts are listening.

gcatellani2k• 3 months ago

I‘d say the same holds true for other use cases and should not only target vibe coders. Eg self driving cars. Level 2 is fine and level 5 is good, it‘s in between these two where I‘m afraid of as people are distracted enough and not able enough to gather what‘s happening around them to react in every situation.

Can Claude Fly a Plane?

Related Stories