True, good point. As far as I know, it does turn itself off if it detects something it can’t handle, though. The problem with cross traffic is that it obviously can’t detect it, otherwise turning itself off would already be a way of handling it.

Proximity detection is far easier up in the air, especially if you’re not bound by the weird requirement to only use visible spectrum cameras.

(To make things clear, I’m just defending the engineers there who had to work within these constraints. All of this is a pure management failure.)

I’m sorry, what? If you set an airplane to maintain altitude and heading with autopilot, it will 100% fly you into the side of a mountain if there’s one in front of you.