Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there can be hundreds of arrivals per hour I Googled about this. London Heathrow is widely regarded as the busiest two runway airport in the world. They allow less than 50 arrival per hour. Are there any airports in the world that can have "hundreds of arrivals per hour"? Conservatively, 200 can be considered "hundreds", then you would need 8x runways operating at max capacity. That seems hard to imagine. Google al…
I think the 3D part is fine, it's more "all of physics" coming into play with a plane. Like bird strikes, engine failures, trying to decide how to handle that. What is the loss function the AI is supposed to apply if an emergency landing is needed? And then if you have people flying the planes, you have to deal with people mostly _but not always_ doing the right thing. So now you build out a plan and have to deal wit…
There's currently a human in the loop at almost all times but a great many planes are already self-flying. Autopilots are a thing, and have been for decades. Modern airliners routinely land themselves, and Garmin have developed an emergency landing system for general aviation aircraft which can handle everything including selecting an airport and communicating with ATC in the case of the pilot being incapacitated.
In many ways a self-piloting plane is an easier problem to solve than self-driving cars. Every plane has (or will have in the near future) a beacon on it transmitting it's location to every other plane around it to allow collision avoidance, and the procedure for getting from one major airport to another is pretty much prescribed in the form of standard departures, arrivals, and airways. The big difference of course is that if a car on the road breaks down and the AI can't handle it then the car can just stop, and baring someone not noticing and plowing into the back of them everyone will be fine, while if that happens in a plane it's a matter of time until the thing falls out of the sky killing everyone on board.