In 1930, the Royal Aircraft Establishment in England developed an autopilot called a pilots' assister that used a pneumatically-spun gyroscope to move the flight controls.
During the first verse, they fly in a pink Hummer and move their heads to the beat on the song, while Spears puts the truck on autopilot.
During the pre-flight check, the pilots had noticed that several systems were unavailable, including the autopilot and electronic flight instrument system (EFIS).
The Apollo Guidance Computer used as an autopilot for the CSM and LEM had a mass of around a hundred pounds and consumed a significant amount of power, so computer controlled flight was out of the question.
It used autopilot principles developed by Professor Archibald Low and already used in the Ruston Proctor AT, a radio controlled biplane that was intended to be used against German Zeppelin bombers.
A 1954 Shanghai Jiaotong University graduate, Professor Zhu was in charge of some of the tests of Type 091 submarine, the first Chinese nuclear submarine in the 1960s, and had successfully developed some subsystems used on the SSN, such as the underwater autopilot, reverse thruster controlling system, and resistance measuring system.
In the liner notes to Nirvana, Rolling Stone writer David Fricke erroneously states that the song had gone under the previous titles of "Autopilot" and "I'm a Mountain."