[HN Gopher] Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe
___________________________________________________________________
Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe
Author : bradleybuda
Score : 221 points
Date : 2025-12-21 16:57 UTC (16 hours ago)
HTML web link (avbrief.com)
TEXT w3m dump (avbrief.com)
| aftbit wrote:
| It's amazing what this technology can do. I wonder what the
| interface in the cockpit was like, who activated it and why, how
| it chose the runway, and other details that will likely come out
| in the final report if not earlier.
|
| I think the radio call could be improved a bit though. It spends
| sooo much time on the letters and so little on the "emergency"
| part. It almost runs that sentence together
| "Emergencyautolandinfourminutesonrunway. three. zero. at. kilo.
| bravo. juliet. charlie."
|
| >Aircraft November 4.7. Niner. Bravo. Romeo. Pilot
| incapacitation. Six miles southeast of Kilo. Bravo. Juliet.
| Charlie. Emergency auto land in four minutes on runway three zero
| right at Kilo. Bravo. Juliet. Charlie.
|
| It would be nice to hear something more like:
|
| Aircraft November-Four-Seven-Niner-Bravo-Romeo. Mayday mayday
| mayday, pilot incapacitation. Six miles southeast of the field.
| Emergency autoland in four minutes on runway three zero right at
| Bravo-Juliet-Charlie.
|
| Still amazing, and successful clear communication ... but it
| could use some more work :)
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| Can't say "the field" in the general case; there are many
| places in the NAS where the same frequency is used by a few
| uncontrolled airports that are close together.
| johng wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that every ATC already knows this automated
| voice and what it means.... in a year or two, after having
| stories and videos it will become even more well known and then
| people will say that repeating emergency too much or spending
| too much time on it is a waste of airtime.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| The cockpit side is very passenger friendly, it assumes zero
| aviation knowledge. It's a single button and once pressed the
| system will show on the screens that it's active, what to
| expect and where it is going. The passengers just sit and
| watch, while it tells you via voice and on the screens what's
| happening. No action required apart from the single button.
|
| It uses the navigation database (onboard) and weather data via
| datalink (ADS-B in the US, satellite in other places) to select
| an airport/runway. It looks for a long enough runway with a
| full LPV (GPS) approach available and favorable wind.
| dataflow wrote:
| That's amazing.
| crooked-v wrote:
| If anything I think it talks slower than the actual pilots
| around it did - https://youtu.be/K3Nl3LOZNjc
| ultrarunner wrote:
| Some of the audio replays I heard had silence cut out, but the
| aircraft transmits every two minutes, for about twenty seconds
| each. It does share the information I'd want to hear in an
| uncontrolled environment, but in a busy towered class delta it
| likely needs to be shortened. They had plenty of advance
| warning of this aircraft being inbound and cleared the airspace
| well before it arrived, but if it had happened with less notice
| critical instructions may have been "stepped on" at a critical
| time.
| Aloha wrote:
| The only complaint is it uses phonetics for everything
| multiple times in each transmission, I'm a radio guy, I would
| use phonetics once, then otherwise spelled out letters - aka,
| "whiskey lima foxtrot" and WLF the next time I needed to say
| it.
| HNisCIS wrote:
| In aviation you only use phonetics, hams are much less
| consistent about it so it looks weird from the outside.
| addaon wrote:
| This is not how communication is done in aviation. Instead,
| it's common to abbreviate to the last three alphanumerics
| of tail numbers (so "niner alpha bravo" for N789AB) after
| the first call -- but this is conditional on not having a
| potentially confusing other aircraft on frequency (N129AB),
| and the system here can't reasonably know that, so must
| take the conservative option.
| Aloha wrote:
| I took issue with calling out the airport, multiple times
| in full phonetics, both at the beginning and the end of
| the transmission. All other callsigns, perfectly
| reasonable.
| dpifke wrote:
| At an untowered field, saying the airport name at the
| beginning and end of each transmission is standard
| phraseology.
| Aloha wrote:
| In phonetics?q
| ultrarunner wrote:
| If anything, the tail number does not matter nearly as
| much. A plane with auto land presumably already has ADSb
| out (almost certainly 1090ES), is squawking 7700, and is
| probably already IFR anyway. As in this situation, the
| controllers knew well in advance they had an emergency
| inbound and who it was. At an uncontrolled field, I need
| something to tag (robotic "bravo-romeo" is plenty) and a
| relative position. Bonus if it does the math and predicts
| landing time, which it does.
|
| Frankly, it should know (like I have to) if it's going to
| auto land at a towered field or uncontrolled, and adjust
| as necessary to those circumstances.
| addaon wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree. Not sure I disagree, either. If I'm
| another pilot in the air when this occurs, it feels like
| the most important things for me to know are (1) stay the
| hell away from the runway, and the announced approach,
| for a while; (2) only a single aircraft is doing an
| emergency autoland currently; (3) assume that the
| aircraft will need medical response while on runway (no
| auto-taxi) so if I was planning on landing in the next
| half hour or so, go to alternate. (1) and (3) are well
| covered, but (2) is subtle -- /today/, the chance of two
| aircraft doing an emergency autoland at the same field at
| the same time is negligible, but it's still something
| both I and the system designers need to think about.
| netsharc wrote:
| The computer announcing the pilot incapacitation is at 11:50.
| nubg wrote:
| Thank you. The time marks in the text were way off.
| mtlynch wrote:
| The mp3 file is malformed but playable. I get different
| timestamps for the same audio if I jump around.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Amazing how bad the speech synthesis is for something so safety
| critical.
| ls612 wrote:
| [flagged]
| HNisCIS wrote:
| This, if it sounds too human ATC is going to try to help
| and possibly provide vectors, as they should, but The way
| the system works, ATC needs to be prioritizing clearing the
| runway and keeping aircraft away
| alwa wrote:
| Then again I understood exactly what it was saying every
| time, which is more than I can say for some of the other
| traffic on that recording. I'm not sure synthetic-sounding
| means bad here.
| nradov wrote:
| The embedded systems qualified for use in general aviation
| avionics have very limited hardware resources. They are
| severely constrained by form factor, power, and cooling. It's
| amazing that the developers were able to get speech synthesis
| working so well.
| exabrial wrote:
| I've ridden on a King Air a few times. Surprised how fast the
| thing was, traveling west to east we sustained 600mph ground
| speed. Also pretty quiet interior given it's powered by
| turboprops.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| 350mph true cruise airspeed for the stock aircraft, so I
| suspect you had a bit of a tailwind there.
| lostmsu wrote:
| I bet on km/h vs mph mistake.
| reactordev wrote:
| If only Biffle was in a King Air.
|
| Awesome to see stuff like this. Light sport aircraft have
| parachutes. Cool to see safety being incorporated into the
| avionics and not just flying it, but getting her down safely.
| ultrarunner wrote:
| This is one of my biggest frustrations with aviation-- the
| certification required to get this done is hugely onerous. The
| whole basis of certified aircraft is that they may not change,
| which makes improvements like airframe parachutes, auto land
| systems, and even terrain awareness, engine monitoring, etc.
| very costly to obtain. I think there is an argument to be made
| that there should be a pathway to airframe recertification to
| allow for innovation and improvement to take place in the
| aviation industry.
|
| Instead, the FAA is probably going backwards on this issue and
| doubling down on the regulatory framework that gave us the
| MAX-8 situation while narrowing any avenue for smaller firms to
| innovate [0]
|
| [0] https://avbrief.com/faa-wants-to-phase-out-ders
| nradov wrote:
| There is simply no way to retrofit a parachute into an
| existing airframe. The airframe has to be designed around it
| from the start with appropriate stress points.
| inoffensivename wrote:
| There are retrofit ballistic recovery systems available as
| a Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) for several existing
| airframes, e.g. https://brsaerospace.com/cessna/
| nradov wrote:
| It's not clear what caused the crash of the private jet
| carrying Greg Biffle and family. The Garmin Autoland system is
| designed to address pilot incapacitation, not mechanical
| failures or active pilot errors.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| If you're one of the many developers at Garmin who worked on
| this, I can't imagine a better Christmas gift!
| FL410 wrote:
| This is a huge milestone, and everyone at Garmin who worked on
| Autoland should be patting themselves on the back, they saved
| some lives today and will undoubtedly save more. Amazing
| technology.
| therobots927 wrote:
| Garmin really is setting a standard for modern engineering. Hard
| to think of another company that still has solid engineering for
| both consumer and industrial applications.
| ultrarunner wrote:
| The hardware side is routinely impressive. The software and
| business sides leave a lot to be desired.
| mtanski wrote:
| Cane to say the same.
|
| I have a Garmin "smart" watch (with every app notification
| etc disabled) and I love the fact that I can do almost two
| weeks of exercises (ride, walk, gym) without needing to
| charge it. The bike computers are also solid. But sadly the
| UX of the software on these leaves a bunch to be desired, and
| I've been bitten by many software and firmware bugs in the
| last years... Including months for which HRM would randomly
| and persistently drop it's value from say whatever the real
| value (say 145 for argument sake) to 80.
| altcognito wrote:
| That's just most heart rate monitors. Often it isn't enough
| conductivity (add water before activity) or the battery is
| low
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > Including months for which HRM would randomly and
| persistently drop it's value from say whatever the real
| value (say 145 for argument sake) to 80.
|
| It's annoying but a proper HR strap fixes all the issues
| associated with wrist based optical readers.
| dima55 wrote:
| Yeah, have they ever actually used a garmin product? The
| hardware and the sound effects are excellent. Everything else
| is barely functional.
| therobots927 wrote:
| Doesn't autoland count as software??
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Even the hardware is kind of stupid. They push you into
| basically buying a separate gps device for each and every
| hobby you do. It would be nice if there was one gps device
| that could be a bike computer, exercise watch, golf gps, etc
| etc. Yes, some devices have multisport mode but usually
| feature locked compared to the more sport specific device,
| and for no good reason really. I guess that would prevent
| them from selling you a $600 gps half a dozen times so that
| is why it isn't done.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| You're basically describing the Fenix/Enduro lines, albeit
| the screen will be a bit small to use as a proper bike
| computer
| stevage wrote:
| You've obviously never used Garmin software. It's always been
| woeful and lags well behind the rest of the industry.
| esses wrote:
| The one bright side is that when I switched from Apple Watch
| to Garmin I couldn't stand the notifications UX. It finally
| got me to turn off watch notifications and I feel much freer.
| darylteo wrote:
| Found the recording with VASAviation subtitles and timeskips
| (because I couldn't decipher it without!)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Nl3LOZNjc
| WalterBright wrote:
| There needs to be a button on the console of every airplane which
| is "return the airplane to straight and level".
| ryandrake wrote:
| All modern autopilot systems I've flown have have a LVL (or
| equivalent) button.
| WalterBright wrote:
| When did that happen? I recall the Air France crash over the
| Atlantic where the pilots got disoriented. And many others,
| like JFKjr's crash.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| What does the AF 449 crash have to do with the existence of
| a button to return the aircraft to wings level + zero
| vertical speed?
|
| To answer your question though, LVL has been around for
| close to two decades now. IIRC there was a Cirrus/Garmin
| partnership that added it to the latter's G1000/GFC 700 and
| it's since trickled out to other consumer-grade autopilots.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The AF 449 was in a stall, and the pilots panicked and
| did exactly the wrong thing. The pilot came out of the
| lavatory and immediately realized what was wrong, and
| pushed the stick forward. But it was too late.
|
| If the captain could figure it out, so could the
| computer.
|
| I recall another crash, not so long ago, of a commuter
| plane where the wings iced up a bit and the airplane
| stalled. The crew kept trying to pull the nose up, all
| the way to the ground. They could have recovered if they
| pushed the stick forward - failing basic stall recovery
| training.
|
| There are many others - I've watched every episode of
| Aviation Disasters. Crew getting spatially disoriented is
| a common cause of crashes.
| sseagull wrote:
| > a commuter plane where the wings iced up a bit and the
| airplane stalled. The crew kept trying to pull the nose
| up, all the way to the ground.
|
| There's probably a lot that match, but sounds like Colgan
| Air 3407 in 2009 (the last major commercial airline crash
| in the US before the mid-air collision earlier this year
| in DC)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407
| WalterBright wrote:
| Yes, that's the one. Nice work finding it!
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| IIRC, they were dealing with frozen pitot tubes or other
| sensors that were keeping the air data computing hardware
| from getting valid input. An automated "Get me out of
| trouble" button might have had the opposite effect.
| WalterBright wrote:
| As I mentioned elsewhere, the captain figured out what
| was wrong immediately, but he was too late.
|
| BTW, my dad taught instrument flying in the AF. He said
| it was simple - look at the instruments. Bring the wings
| level, then the pitch level. Although simple, your body
| screams at you that it's wrong.
|
| He carried with him a steel pipe, so he could beat a
| student unconscious who panicked and would not let go of
| the controls. This was against regulation, but he wasn't
| going to let a student pilot kill him.
|
| When JFKjr's crash was on the evening news, he said two
| words - "spacial disorientation". Months later, that was
| the official cause.
| tjohns wrote:
| > He carried with him a steel pipe, so he could beat a
| student unconscious who panicked and would not let go of
| the controls.
|
| Most flight instructors just keep a spare pen in their
| pocket to jab an uncooperative student in thigh with.
| (Thankfully almost never used.)
| ajju wrote:
| Super cool! We live in the future my friends :)
| cesarb wrote:
| > We live in the future my friends
|
| I second that. Hearing in the VASAviation video (linked by
| someone else in a nearby thread) the robotic voice announcing
| what it's doing, while it does a completely autonomous landing
| in an airport it autonomously decided on, with no possibility
| of fallback to or help from a human pilot, is one of these
| moments when we feel like we're living in the future promised
| by the so many sci-fi stories we've read as children.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Absolutely amazing. Well done, Garmin. Imagine getting to go to
| work everyday to work on something that actually saves lives.
| Fantastic systems engineering work.
| briffle wrote:
| You'd be even more impressed if you saw just how little
| resources they have to use (ram, storage, cpu), or how old of a
| C standard they have to work with. I have a few friends that
| work on this.
| sib301 wrote:
| I am indeed impressed but not at all surprised considering
| what we used to get to the moon!
| ultrarunner wrote:
| Seems like Java is popular at Garmin.
| nradov wrote:
| And also -- sadly -- Monkey C. I cannot imagine what
| possessed them to invent their own scripting language for
| wearable device apps. It's sort of like JavaScript but
| worse and with minimal third-party tooling support.
|
| https://developer.garmin.com/connect-iq/monkey-c/
| Palomides wrote:
| it kinda sucks, but with the constraints it's at least
| understandable. they wanted an extremely lightweight
| language with a bytecode VM which could be ported to
| whatever MCUs in 2015, while also strictly limiting the
| functionality for battery usage reasons (and, uh, product
| segmentation/limiting third party access).
| gpm wrote:
| These days I'd say "sounds like wasm" but I guess 2015
| was a bit before that took off.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Sounds like p-code.
| pjmlp wrote:
| There have been enough bytecodes since UNCOL in 1958 to
| chose from, and embedded is full of them, nothing special
| about WASM.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| While I might not trust C code more than Java in life
| saving equipment, I would trust a median C developer over a
| Java one.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Given the amount of CVEs that would be a bad bet.
|
| High integrity computing is full of pain staking
| processes, exactly because no one trusts C developers to
| do the right thing.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| " Imagine getting to go to work everyday to work on something
| that actually saves lives."
|
| I work on medical devices that improve and save lives but the
| work actually kind of sucks. You spend most of your time on
| documentation and develop with outdated tools. It's important
| work but I would much prefer "move fast and break things". So
| much more interesting.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Not to invalidate your experience, but I think both of you
| feel this way because "you only want what you don't have".
| There are different kinds of joy that come from being
| impactful, and different kinds that come from moving fast. If
| only we could move fast and be impactful :'(
| 1over137 wrote:
| Lots of the moving fast stuff is very impactful, just often
| in a bad way.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| I could be fast and impactful. Just in a negative way. The
| problem is that I come from the software dev side so I tend
| to be less interested in the medical side. It's the same in
| a lot of safety critical. There is a lot of mundane work to
| tick the necessary checkboxes. There isn't much that is
| interesting from a technological side. Maybe the result is
| interesting but getting there takes a lot of extremely
| boring work.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Maybe you should change your line of work. If you're that
| unhappy about what you do in spite of the fact that what
| you do is orders of magnitude more important than the
| next move-fast-and-break-things-advertising-driven-
| unicorn then that suggests to me that you should let
| someone else take over who does derive happiness from it
| and you get yours from a faster paced environment.
|
| Personally, you couldn't pay me enough to do the latter
| and I'd be more than happy to do the former (but I'm not
| exactly looking for a job).
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| I am retiring next year. So that should solve my problem
| :). I don't know how other medical device companies are
| working but in mine leadership is dominated by people who
| know medical devices from a sales or medical perspective.
| Software is kind of secondary to them although it's
| becoming really important. A lot of our processes aren't
| very good for software so we end up doing a lot of work
| that makes no sense and makes the product actually worse.
| It's better not to fix bugs because a new release will
| take months of paperwork. The requirement structure
| doesn't map to software but the SOP isn't written by
| people who known software. It feels a little like the
| development speed of NASA with the SLS vs SpaceX who are
| basically doing everything faster and cheaper while still
| having high reliability . My company is NASA here. Just
| very frustrating
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've worked with a startup in the medical device space.
| Well funded. They were indistinguishable from most other
| startups, except in one detail: they did everything
| right. They made some extremely high tech stuff, very
| lightweight, and technology wise they were closer to
| watchmakers than to software and hardware people. I loved
| working with them and helped them to improve their yield
| (their QA was so strict that of their initial couple of
| runs more than 2/3rds of the devices got binned for the
| smallest infractions).
|
| I suspect you may have just been unlucky with where you
| ended up. I'm getting closer to retirement myself but I
| no longer have to work for 'the man' so in that sense I
| got really lucky. But I really sympathize with how you
| feel. So, count the days, and look forward to something
| nicer. Best!
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| What is in this particular case that requires outdated tools?
| If they are code, certainly you can write them on VS Code or
| whatever you likes, and only need to compile and load on the
| original tools, can't you?
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| It's more the library and language side. Typically you are
| years behind and once a version has proven to be working,
| the reluctance to upgrade is high. It's getting really
| interesting with the rise of package managers and small
| packages. Validating all of them is a ton of effort. It was
| easier with larger frameworks
| SoftTalker wrote:
| You need tracability from requirements down to lines of
| code. It's a very painstaking process.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| Painstaking and often done with terrible tools and badly
| written requirements.
| jonp888 wrote:
| Sometimes it's because you need to support ancient esoteric
| hardware that's not supported by any other tools, or
| because you've built so much of your own tooling around a
| particular tool that it resembles application platform in
| it's own right.
|
| Other times it's just because there are lots of other teams
| involved in validation, architecture, requirements and
| document management and for everyone except the developers,
| changing anything about your process is extra work for no
| benefit.
|
| At one time I worked on a project with two compiler suites,
| two build systems, two source control systems and two CI
| systems all operating in parallel. In each case there was
| "officially approved safe system" and the "system we can
| actually get something done with".
|
| We eventually got rid of the duplicate source control, but
| only because the central IT who hosted it declared it EOL
| and thus the non-development were forced, kicking and
| screaming to accept the the system the developers had been
| using unofficially for years.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| Well, I'm glad it's that slow. I can't shake the idea of the
| horrors it would be to get a glucose pump whose software has
| been vibe-coded.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I work on team managing safety critical code. Management
| has asked to increase our AI usage, especially for
| generating requirements.
| justinclift wrote:
| Oh, you could "move fast and break things" in your current
| job. For a while... ;)
|
| (please don't)
| BrentOzar wrote:
| There are rumors that there were 2 pilots aboard, and that one of
| them accidentally triggered autoland, and they couldn't figure
| out how to turn it off:
|
| https://vansairforce.net/threads/garmin-emergency-autoland-i...
| lsowen wrote:
| And also didn't know how to work thr radio? Surely autoland
| doesn't disable communication
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| seems like an unlikely rumor to be true at this time
| jibal wrote:
| There's _a_ rumor, that you are propagating. One person,
| Tandem46, made this claim ... no evidence provided.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Why doesn't it always autoland? We already have self driving
| cars, so a self flying plane seems imminent.
| TylerE wrote:
| Because it requires specific equipment that many airports do
| not have, for one. It also doesn't understand things like noise
| abatement procedures. It has to be setup properly. You don't
| want pilots forgetting how to _fly the airplane_. Any of a
| dozen other reasons.
| scottbez1 wrote:
| Very different standards - in its current form of emergency
| autoland it just needs to be proven to result in equal or
| better outcomes as a plane with no rated pilot onboard; the
| best case is another person that knows how to use the radio and
| can listen to instructions but the more likely case is a
| burning wreckage when the pilot is incapacitated.
|
| To _always_ auto land it needs to be as good as a fully trained
| and competent pilot, a much higher standard.
| MBCook wrote:
| We don't have self driving cars.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| If they didn't have to coexist with human drivers, we damned
| sure would.
|
| We have a couple of nuclear-powered self-driving cars on
| _Mars_.
| charcircuit wrote:
| I've confirmed with my own 2 eyes cars driving on the road
| without humans in them. I've also rode in a Waymo which had
| no driver. They definitely exist. Teslas also have self
| driving.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| These people are basically Moon-landing deniers. They crop
| up a lot these days, sadly. I wish they'd crop up somewhere
| else.
| adrr wrote:
| i assume it has to do with success rate. If a safety system is
| 99% successful, that's really good. Not so good if you're going
| to use it all time.
| segmondy wrote:
| did you see the disruption to air traffic? everyone that needed
| to land had to go into a holding pattern. the plane was
| communicating to tower and was going to land since it was
| emergency. it was not observing other traffic, part of landing
| is knowing the location of other aircrafts to avoid collision.
| This doesn't seem to have collision detection/avoidance and
| space coordination with other aircrafts and entering holding
| pattern to delay programming yet. This is a good start.
| charcircuit wrote:
| If they designed it to be used for every landing those issues
| would be resolved. The rarer you use features like this, the
| more disruptive they will be.
| tjohns wrote:
| That's a really big _if_ , especially since not all traffic
| has a transponder, and not all airports are towered.
|
| It would need to understand how to visually look for
| traffic with a camera, and understand what intentions other
| pilots are communicating on the radio.
| TylerE wrote:
| Just draw the rest of the owl. Easy.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Easier than self driving at least.
| ursAxZA wrote:
| This feels like the evolutionary endpoint of what people casually
| call "autopilot," not the traditional aviation sense.
| vishalontheline wrote:
| We have auto-pilot, and we have auto-land. Once we have auto-taxi
| and auto-takeoff, whats left?
| jordanb wrote:
| auto-troubleshoot
| anonu wrote:
| Claude "fly this plane"
| sb057 wrote:
| "You're absolutely right; that runway was decommissioned in
| 1974 and is now a cornfield. Would you like me to contact
| emergency medical services and file an accident report with
| the F.A.A.?"
| PyWoody wrote:
| Auto-radio
| snuxoll wrote:
| Embraer has been working on their auto takeoff system, E2TS,
| for some time. While improved safety during a critical phase of
| flight is a goal, airlines are looking at the possibility that
| it allows increased performance (higher MTOW, shorter runways,
| less fuel burn.)
| nodesocket wrote:
| Unfortunately there was a plane crash on Thursday of a Cessna
| Citation 550 that killed former Nascar driver Greg Biffle, his
| wife, his two kids, and both pilots. Greg Biffle himself was a
| certificated pilot and helicopter pilot but not flying in the
| crash. Incredibly sad. Hopefully technology such as this can
| reduce these tragedies.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| We massively discount how much better we make the world every
| day.
| mmooss wrote:
| I wonder if a human is in the loop. Obviously the software is
| hardly ever used (a good thing), so you wouldn't need many humans
| available. If communication is possible, wouldn't you hand
| control to a pilot on the ground?
|
| I don't know that they could actually fly the plane - is latency
| too high for landing? - but they could make all the decisions and
| communicate with air traffic control, other planes, and the
| passengers.
| joshribakoff wrote:
| Without even getting into latency, just consider the fact that
| you could lose the signal altogether
| mmooss wrote:
| So then it's handed off to the autopilot and you are no worse
| off. But as much as possible, I'd much rather have a human
| pilot in control.
|
| Militaries have been flying UAVs for awhile now, which must
| have the same challenges.
| gpm wrote:
| One major difference is if a uav crashes no one dies. But
| in china there is apparently now a commercial pilotless
| flying ev taxi service - which is autonomous with a human
| on the ground in the loop as you are suggesting.
| nradov wrote:
| Remote piloting for landing an aircraft that size is
| problematic because you need more sensors on the aircraft
| plus a reliable, high-bandwidth, low-latency data link.
| That doesn't really exist in most places. When the military
| lands something like an MQ-9 Reaper they typically hand off
| control to a pilot located within line-of-sight right at
| the airfield. That obviously isn't practical for civilian
| general aviation.
| tjohns wrote:
| The problem is every aircraft model flies differently. The
| remote pilot would need to be familiar with that particular
| type of aircraft to safely land it.
| mmooss wrote:
| I'm thinking of higher-level contributions such looking
| at the weather and saying 'fly to this airport and use
| this runway'; or asking the passenger, 'what does this
| gauge say?' or 'look at the left engine; what do you
| see?'; or talking to air traffic control.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Proudly wearing my Fenix!
| lupire wrote:
| FYI, a King Air is a small general aviation plane, seating up the
| 13 passengers.
| Animats wrote:
| This is Garman SafeReturn, and this is its first real save.
| Here's a demo.[1] It's been shipping since about 2020, originally
| on the Cirrus Vision Jet. There's a lot going on. The system is
| aware of terrain, weather, and fuel, but not of runway status. So
| it gives the ground a few minutes to get ready, sending voice
| emergency messages to ATC. If you watch the flight track, you can
| see the aircraft circle several times, some distance from the
| airport, then do a straight-in approach. It sets up for landing,
| wheels down, flaps down, lands, brakes, and turns of the the
| engine. It doesn't taxi. Someone from the ground will have to tow
| or taxi the aircraft off the runway.
|
| It's mostly GPS driven, plus a radar altimeter for landing.
|
| The system can be triggered by a button in the cockpit, a button
| in the passenger area, and a system that detects the pilot isn't
| making any inputs for a long period or the aircraft is unstable
| and the pilot isn't trying to stabilize it. The pilot can take
| control back, but if they don't, the airplane will be
| automatically landed.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-ruFmgTpqA
| shrubble wrote:
| Famously the golfer Payne Stewart and the total of 6 people on
| the LearJet 35, died after a sudden loss of cabin pressure
| incapacitated everyone including the pilots. A system like
| this, would have detected it and possibly saved them.
|
| I wouldn't expect a whole lot more detail, as that airport is
| often used by defense contractors like Ball Aerospace, who have
| a large office nearby.
| jshier wrote:
| Even without autoland, I've never understood why there wasn't
| an emergency system to handle depressurization events when it
| detects no pilot input. There have been enough ghost flights,
| even in the last 20 years, that such a system could've saved
| hundreds of lives. (Helios Air 552) Automatically dropping
| altitude, or even just changing the transponder to some
| automatic value, would help.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| SafeReturn doesn't detect that as I understand it. It still
| requires manual activation by one of the passengers.
| AmbroseBierce wrote:
| It does:
|
| > Safe Return is an emergency system designed to be
| deployed by passengers in case of pilot incapacitation. But
| Safe Return also is programmed to activate itself when it
| senses the pilot has become unresponsive or succumbed to
| hypoxia.
|
| Source: https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-
| news/2025/june/pilot...
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Ah ok I was not aware of that. I have not flown a plane
| that had it (I did fly some with G1000 and autopilot but
| it didn't have this, I think it's only an option on the
| G3000). But I just saw about the activation button.
| silisili wrote:
| This is fascinating.
|
| My uncle was a pilot, and I asked him 15 years or so ago about
| the job. He was going on and on about computers and autopilot,
| claiming that pilots were only really needed anymore for
| takeoffs and landings, and they could sleep during the rest.
| Probably realizing the liability in what he said, he was quick
| to clarify that he didn't, of course.
|
| In that short time span we now have a system that can land a
| plane by itself. Nothing less than magic, and huge
| congratulations and thanks to everyone at Garmin who made this
| happen.
| dingaling wrote:
| Even take-off doesn't _really_ need a pilot; the production
| Lockheed TriStar airliner had full automation and on at least
| one occasion ( 25 May 1972 ) flew entirely from runway to
| runway, across the USA, without pilot intervention.
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