This is a seriously impressive bit of software engineering. It seems as simple as "push a button" to the layman but what happens when:
There is a thunderstorm between the airport and the runway
The nearest runway is closed due to a blizzard
There is a mountain between the normal 3-degree glide-slope and the runway, an "offset approach"
There is a 40-knot crosswind
You have an engine out
That's just a few, I'm a commercial pilot and software engineer, and I find this insanely impressive.
nabla9 1635 days ago [-]
It's to be used only in the event that the pilot is incapacitated.
Because it's an emergency feature engaged by a passenger or automatically, it probably can't manage all complex situations. It may be just good weather emergency landing. Check fuel and wind, steer to nearest emergency airport and land. Best effort is better than no effort and dying.
> There is a mountain between the normal 3-degree glide-slope and the runway, an "offset approach"
I think it can land only to those airports that are it's database with landing approaches programmed it.
Cruise missiles have had similar technology for a long time.
During those first few seconds after I hit the Autoland button, the system went through a series of complex calculations and decision-making processes to determine the nearest suitable runway based on runway length, width, and surface; fuel remaining; crosswind component; terrain; obstacles; and general weather information. The system requires an RNAV approach, but beyond that, the runway and weather criteria can be decided by the airframe manufacturer.
The system even forecasts its own weather if the nearest suitable runway is a significant distance away, long enough that the current ADS-B or SiriusXM weather may not be valid. It uses the latest weather trend information, for example, to determine if a thunderstorm might move into the runway environment where it intends to land. It will route the airplane around thunderstorms as well as terrain and obstacles, all of which it gets from its internal databases. If en route to a runway it determines, because of changing weather conditions, that another runway is closer or more suitable, it will change its destination. It can even estimate changing barometric conditions and adjust the altimeter—using algorithms. Garmin engineers say the calculated barometric readings are within 0.01 inches of mercury of actual ambient conditions.
Daviey 1635 days ago [-]
> Cruise missiles have had similar technology for a long time.
I try to make my landings a little less eventful.
AWildC182 1635 days ago [-]
A "good" landing is one which people can walk away from and a "great" landing is one where you can use the cruise missile again so by definition, a cruise missile can complete neither a "good" nor a "great" landing by design.
bstrong 1635 days ago [-]
"One unusual capability of the Snark missile was its ability to fly away from its launch point for up to 11 hours, and then return for a landing. If its warhead did not detach from its body, then the Snark could be flown repeatedly."
Of course cold war shenanigans would prove me wrong.... I stand corrected
OnlineGladiator 1635 days ago [-]
Well in theory it could fail in such a miraculous way that everything is intact and it just skidded across the dirt - so while that might be considered a "good" landing it would be considered a "bad" missile launch.
exikyut 1635 days ago [-]
Then the SpaceX stage1 (or stage2, or however they call it) is a missile that only makes great landings. :D
serf 1635 days ago [-]
there are plenty of loitering munitions that have great landings routinely.
rhombocombus 1635 days ago [-]
I prefer to be subsonic before I let the mains touch down (atleast...)
kevin_thibedeau 1635 days ago [-]
> Cruise missiles have had similar technology for a long time.
Until GPS guidance came into use they were relatively crude terrain followers requiring a preloaded flight plan over a known terrain profile with sufficient bumpiness to protect against IMU drift. Nothing at all like this technology.
SEJeff 1635 days ago [-]
Cruise missiles don't "land" and they don't care about passenger safety :)
briandear 1635 days ago [-]
Almost airport with runways long enough to land G3000 equipped airplanes will have a published approach. What will be interesting though is how this system handles circle to land approaches.
cornellwright 1635 days ago [-]
My guess is it would choose a different approach or airport rather than circling if the winds are too unfavorable.
iancmceachern 1635 days ago [-]
> Cruise missiles have had similar technology for a long time.
Yeah but an average human couldn't, and thankfully still cannot buy one. This is feature on a (and more to come) civilian aircraft, two very different things.
zarkov99 1635 days ago [-]
Would it be a lot simpler to have a remote pilot access the controls? Why go through all this ?
rexaliquid 1635 days ago [-]
Establishing, maintaining, and handling the inevitable connection issues of the data connection necessary to remote pilot an aircraft is a lot more work than integrating a "best route" algorithm with existing autopilot features, automated radio communication, and calming cockpit UI.
zarkov99 1635 days ago [-]
I was assuming that this was a solved problem, given how prevalent drone warfare is now.
ceejayoz 1634 days ago [-]
The military can easily afford other aircraft to serve as relays and satellite data connections that a general aviation pilot probably can't.
"The routing algorithm determines a path to the Final Approach Fix (FAF) of the chosen published approach that avoids terrain, obstacles, and significant weather."
That handles all of your contingencies except an engine failure. If you have an engine failure and a pilot who can't dead-stick a landing you're probably screwed. But you're still no worse off in that case than you would have been without autoland.
rhombocombus 1635 days ago [-]
That is largely mitigated by the MUCH more reliable turboprop in the M600. They have problems much less frequently than piston engines. Not to say they don't happen, or that it isn't important that pilots train for engine out scenarios, it's crucial for pilot safety and an integral part of Aeronautical Decision Making, but this technology on a turboprop platform has the potential to dramatically reduce the likelihood of a fatal accident.
jsmith45 1635 days ago [-]
There even exists software for auto-planning a route for a dead stick landing: Xavion, by the author of x-plane.
I seem to remember reading like 4 or more years ago, that there was an experimental autoland system actually powered by that software, and could autoland in a dead stick situation.
EDIT: Found the experimental engine-out auto-land system based on the same technology as xavion: It is called the VP-400 by Vertical Power. I'm not sure if it ever became a purchasable product.
appstorelottery 1635 days ago [-]
I think this a case for better GA trining. Expecting engine failure on takeoff, building the counterintuitive pitch-down reflex to avoid stall, and so on. Knowing your minimum maneuverable speed (and marking it on your air speed indicator). Expecting something to go wrong is the key mindset. A GA death happens roughly once a week for the reasons you outline. Emergency situations are not time to learn new skills, you need to have it down.
bdamm 1635 days ago [-]
That's true, but, we also accept a certain risk as GA pilots being non-commercial. The risk we accept is translated into a larger GA industry that makes flying as a hobby "affordable" to mere mortals (read: wealthy non-millonaires and not career pilots.)
We can require more training for GA, but the training burden is already pretty high, and the GA industry is still shrinking last time I checked. Boosting safety requirements in the form of additional training for GA may save a few lives, but also those gains could be simply because there will be fewer hobby pilots.
The fact is that GA planes falling out of the sky just doesn't kill very many people. It obviously feels terrible to the families involved in a crash, but relative to automotive deaths, lung cancer, murders, etc, it is a tiny tiny blip in the numbers. Obviously being a GA pilot boosts your chance of dying in a small airplane crash, in the same way that learning to ride a motorcycle boosts your chance of dying in a motorcycle crash. The alternative of killing off recreational flying, is worse.
1635 days ago [-]
appstorelottery 1635 days ago [-]
I’m not talking about making training harder - just changing the mindset of GA pilots. I wrote more in a reply below if you’re interested.
Zak 1635 days ago [-]
This system appears to be designed primarily for situations involving pilot incapacitation, not compensating for deficits in pilot skill.
HeyLaughingBoy 1635 days ago [-]
All of that was covered, to the point of automatic reflex, during my Private Pilot training. I'm pretty sure it was standard, and not just my Instructor.
appstorelottery 1635 days ago [-]
Private training varies, I have a friend that didn’t build that reflex properly until training for instrument cert. If you ask lots of private pilots - what’s more important: constant awareness of minimum maneuverable speed, or stall recovery - I expect most will answer stall recovery. Commercial pilots will answer the opposite. It’s a different mindset that’s been driven by commercial airlines. My point is GA training can be improved, and it’s not hard - just a change in mindset towards risk and preparedness.
HeyLaughingBoy 1635 days ago [-]
I agree that that answer is strange. I would have assumed that everyone would answer that it's better to avoid the stall in the first place than have to deal with recovering from it. Clearly, I'm wrong!
jacquesm 1635 days ago [-]
I disagree with that. You might now be a pilot who has lost his experience in how to land an airplane and so will do a much worse job of it compounded by the emergency situation. Every landing is also training.
lisper 1635 days ago [-]
Yes, that true, but this autoland system is not intended for routine use. It's for emergencies only.
jacquesm 1635 days ago [-]
Ah, 'you' being 'the passenger and/or the incapacitated pilot' rather than the regular and healthy variety of pilot. Ok, now I understand your comment. Thank you for clarifying.
griffinkelly 1635 days ago [-]
I've flown airplanes with solid GA plane autopilot that'll fly down to decision height, but you still have to put in flaps, gear, change throttle. To have an airplane do all that on its own is quite impressive, particularly to do a 'nearest' type input on a Garmin then to land it on the appropriate runway, still confuses me sometimes if its a new airport I've never been at.
I'd be interested to know if it declares an emergency, squawks 7700 and controllers are expected to give it a priority and right of way?
tialaramex 1635 days ago [-]
It sets 7700 and broadcasts what's happening, incapacitated pilot is an emergency so that's what it will tell everybody. If there's a controller on frequency it's up to that controller what to do about it, but there's no use arguing with a machine and the pilot is incapacitated, so my expectation is that a controller will keep other traffic out of the way, and if the autoland has picked somewhere with a local tower they'd call that tower and give it heads up it has got an incoming emergency, expect to close the incident runway while they clean up the aftermath.
Regardless, the machine will be broadcasting its intentions and again, there's no arguing with a machine other pilots will just have to accept that it's intending to land and stop on the runway putting it out of use until further notice.
Since the machine can't see lights, I assume it doesn't care whether they are functioning. So in the dark it's likely to land at some small airfield which is actually closed, slightly scary for the passengers to just come to a halt in darkness far from anywhere but arguably safer since nobody else is going to make the error of landing when the runway remains occupied.
FabHK 1635 days ago [-]
> they'd call that tower and give it heads up it has got an incoming emergency
No need:
> [Autoland] would update and broadcast that message every 30 seconds—listening to make sure that it didn’t transmit over any other radio calls. Once near the Class D airspace of the tower, it would have changed one of the radios to the tower frequency and kept the other on the emergency frequency.
Then, once landed, it will brake, and then broadcast that the runway is inop due to airplane on the runway.
Why? Airbus and Boeing and even smaller planes like bombedaire have had this capability. With ads-b requirements on all planes it puts GA aircraft in line with jets (ads-b requires transmitting internal information that autopilot also processes)
What I’m trying to say is that the auto land functionality is not a feat, it’s like self parking cars.. been around for 20 years just now cost efficient and safe enough for the masses to use. In a boeing 787, the pilot still needs to squawk 7777 and they should try comms, don’t know why a GA plane would be different..
andrewg 1635 days ago [-]
Autoland, as used in a capable airliner, is much more limited than this. For an airliner, it's a procedure with lots of configuration and monitoring done by a pilot, in cooperation with air traffic control, which usually concludes with descent on a 3-degree or so path through touchdown and braking. Not to mention things like flaps and landing gear are still usually manually selected.
This is much more impressive, not the least of which because the system itself figures out the best place to land (taking into account operational constraints), how to get there (taking into account weather avoidance), and how to be at the right speed, altitude, configuration, etc. to perform the final approach to landing.
So to use your analogy, getting a bit closer to a self-driving car than just self parking!
outworlder 1635 days ago [-]
> the pilot still needs to squawk 7777 and they should try comms, don’t know why a GA plane would be different..
The system being discussed is for when you no longer have a pilot.
crooked-v 1635 days ago [-]
Yes, this is not routine autopilot landing, this is "the pilot just had a massive heart attack and the only other people in the plane are a 12-year-old and an armless nun" landing.
stanski 1635 days ago [-]
The marketing material suggests that weather and runway conditions are taken into account when selecting a landing site. So I would assume the answer to all of those is that it won't pick that runway.
And if the aircraft is low on fuel or isn't making enough power to make that runway... Well, the usual happens - a forced landing, aka a crash landing.
I don't think this is meant to be used as a cop-out by the pilot. "My engine quit! You deal with this, computer!"
cjrp 1634 days ago [-]
In the Vision Jet I believe low fuel / no suitable airport in range leads to automatic CAPS deployment by the autoland system
throw0101a 1635 days ago [-]
Thunderstorm: it can use weather broadcast over ADS-In UAT. Mentioned in the AVweb report.
Closure: certainly a problem.
Mountain: can use worldwide topographic information in its database to route around. See AVweb
Crosswind: mentions getting local weather.
Engine: Autland cannot help. But on the Cirrus you'd pull the CAPS cord and float down.
pc86 1635 days ago [-]
CAPS is not supposed to be used because you have an engine out under most circumstances - you are perfectly capable of dead-sticking a Cirrus onto a runway just like any other small GA plane. And it's not a gentle float, it's ~1700fpm or about 20mph, straight down. The airframe and seats absorb a chunk of it but compared to a 500-700fpm descent on an engine-out landing, pulling CAPS because your engine dies with any sufficient landing area in range (including open fields) will rightfully earn you quite a bit of ridicule.
throw0101a 1635 days ago [-]
Nope:
> > There are very few emergencies (in my opinion) in which parachute deployment would be the appropriate response unless there was an extremely unfortunate set of circumstances which led to the airplane being unable to fly or glide (like a wing snapping off)
> I've been a Cirrus instructor for 15 years. This attitude is completely wrong and is exactly what has led more people to be killed than needed to be, especially when Cirruses first came to the market and the chute was a new thing in production aircraft. We TEACH, intentionally, people to ask FIRST, "do I need to use the chute," and the answer is never "no." It's either, "Yes," or "not yet."
> There have been pilots - plenty of them - that had every opportunity to use the chute but kept gliding, or spinning, or whatever, and now they and their passengers are dead.
[...]
> Lose the engine - most of the time, pull the chute. Yes, even better than landing in a nice open field. The chute works. If I screw up the landing, or the field has ditches, furrows, irrigation, cows, power lines, fences, rocks, or who knows what else, I might just be screwed setting a plane down at 65-70kts. But not if I float down into it protected by my roll cage, high-g seats, air bags, etc.
The insurance companies apparently want pilots to pull the CAPS rather than try to dead stick it. That’s what I was told when I got checked out in the SR22 by the flight school. They drilled it into me. What happens when blah blah blah? Pull the CAPS. That was the answer to everything.
dsfyu404ed 1635 days ago [-]
>The insurance companies apparently want pilots to pull the CAPS rather than try to dead stick it.
Well of course they do.
CAPS does a pretty good job putting an upper bound on the worst case result. They don't care if you screw your plane up because that's a known cost and you'll pay it back through premiums if you keep flying.
Dead sticking it has a very good chance of being no more expensive than a normal landing if you find a runway and not all that expensive if you find a good field or empty highway (i.e. a big towing bill) so of course most pilots would prefer to dead stick. But this comes with a small chance of you crashing into a daycare and maxing out your policy. The insurers do not want this.
Most decent pilots with good situational will be able to make the correct call between CAPs and dead sticking it. They're telling you to go CAPS all the time because they have to deal with idiot pilots too. It's the same reason every drivers ed program emphasizes brakes, brakes, brakes, despite the steering wheel being a far better way to avoid many problems. They don't trust you to make the call.
briandear 1635 days ago [-]
One of my friends is a Cirrus platinum instructor, including being type rated for the Vision Jet and even he had a CAPS pull as his first choice versus landing off airport. They call it dead sticking for a reason.
dsfyu404ed 1635 days ago [-]
Was it his plane or a company plane? There's a big difference between taking on a little extra risk for your money vs someone else's money.
whyaduck 1635 days ago [-]
What's "a little extra risk"? A 5% chance you'll die? 1%? 0.1%? Compared to what? Those are actually very large risks when the cost is your life. When the survival rate of using CAPS is an order of magnitude (or more) safer? Use the chute. Not to mention how bad a decision it would be to dead stick if there are passengers on board.
pc86 1634 days ago [-]
> When the survival rate of using CAPS is an order of magnitude (or more) safer?
If I had something like Xavion to help with the approach I would probably choose the dead stick approach but really, how often have any of us ever really dead sticked it? I haven't. We pull the power to idle, but that's not the same as a propeller windmilling. That propeller is a huge brake and we aren't used to it. I for one prefer five nines of survival probability to something much smaller. What are the dead stick survival stats?
dsfyu404ed 1635 days ago [-]
Anecdotal story:
I know of a skydive place that does or at least used to regularly (like once or twice a week) dead stick it in a C182 because they would fly with the bare minimum of fuel (when you're flying up and down all day even a little extra weight costs a lot of money).
Scoundreller 1635 days ago [-]
CAPS sounds great over open water or desert, but not so great over a populated area.
At least a non-pilot co-passenger might want to try their luck gliding to open area and then pulling it.
DuskStar 1635 days ago [-]
A 20mph vertical impact into someone's roof really isn't the worst of outcomes.
wtallis 1635 days ago [-]
Yeah, I don't think it would be any more catastrophic than a large tree crashing into the roof. It'll be messy and require extensive repairs, but you're not going to see a fireball and crater.
guidoism 1635 days ago [-]
I'm not sure 20mph is correct. The POH says it's the equivalent of being dropped from 10 feet. It's not something I want to experience but it doesn't really sound that bad.
ceejayoz 1635 days ago [-]
> The POH says it's the equivalent of being dropped from 10 feet.
A fall of 10 feet puts you at ~17 mph when you hit. 20mph is a good approximation.
pc86 1634 days ago [-]
Post-CAPS deployment descent is about 1700fpm which is 19.3-ish mph.
guidoism 1633 days ago [-]
Ok. I was wrong.
Scoundreller 1635 days ago [-]
I’m thinking more like power lines, or the chute catching a tall building, some industrial facilities may not be great either. Or moving traffic.
You’ll go wherever the wind pulls you. And might hit the side of something faster than 20mph before hitting the ground.
And hitting a crowd at 20mph.
briandear 1635 days ago [-]
Wrong. Check the Cirrus POH and exactly the opposite you said is true. In an engine out over the minimum altitude and under the pull speed, use the chute.
Chute pulls are almost 100% survivable. Landing in a field is a much lower percentage. Just hitting nearly invisible power lines can slice a plane in half. You also have a fire danger when landing off airport. And many dead engine landings result in landing short of the field.
You aren’t going to get ridicule from the Cirrus community for pulling the chute and even if you did, it’s less ridicule than crash landing into a field that looked suitable from 2000 feet up.
jjwiseman 1635 days ago [-]
Yes. One of my friends died landing in a field with engine out.
It's almost impossible to tell what the situation is on the ground until it's too late--an unnoticed ditch can kill you.
briandear 1635 days ago [-]
Except ADS-B NEXRAD weather is generally 15-20 minutes behind the actual conditions. Using on board weather radar is much better .. many G3000 airplanes are using onboard weather radar rather than the outdated info from ADS-B.
andrewg 1635 days ago [-]
M600 has onboard radar (it's the pod on the right wing).
ScottBurson 1635 days ago [-]
For us non-pilots: what is CAPS?
rexaliquid 1635 days ago [-]
Cirrus Airframe Parachute System - a whole aircraft emergency parachute
throw0101a 1635 days ago [-]
It's not a US/non-US thing, it's a Cirrus thing: a parachute.
"Conditions are not suitable for autoland functionality. Please navigate to a location with a clear view of a runway and try again. Sorry for any inconvenience."
joshvm 1635 days ago [-]
> During all phases of flight it communicates with passengers and appropriate air traffic control facilities regarding the new flight plan route and estimated time until landing.
Which would suggest that if you need to be vectored to a runway, the aircraft can negotiate that with ATC automatically (and perhaps ATC can advise which is the most appropriate diversion?) This in the situation where the pilot is incapacitated, but the aircraft isn't in an immediate risk of crashing (e.g. you're cruising, but there's bad weather immediately below you).
It should also be able to use stuff like D-ATIS to get airport conditions.
That seems optimistic though, perhaps it just announces its intentions and hopes ATC clears a path?
ceejayoz 1635 days ago [-]
> Which would suggest that if you need to be vectored to a runway, the aircraft can negotiate that with ATC automatically (and perhaps ATC can advise which is the most appropriate diversion?)
I strongly suspect it just announces itself.
"N123FOO DECLARING EMERGENCY; PILOT INCAPACITATED, AUTOLAND ENGAGED; CLEAR RUNWAY 21L; 12 MILES OUT" sort of stuff.
usrusr 1635 days ago [-]
Still makes me wonder: do you really need/want all that automation or would it make more sense to prepare for putting a remote pilot into the loop? Not for virtually holding the stick, but for looking at telemetry, communicating and doing all the high level decisions.
skykooler 1635 days ago [-]
If you have a remote pilot then you need some sort of data connection as well; and if that link cuts out the plane needs to be able to continue on its own anyway.
ceejayoz 1635 days ago [-]
It'd have to be as an additional safety measure. Connectivity is by no means guaranteed - you'd be relying on satellite comms in most cases. Maybe when SpaceX's Starlink comes online.
(It'd probably also be significantly more expensive, due to the need for a subscription.)
andrewg 1635 days ago [-]
There are certainly incredible situations with happy endings where ATC has made suggestions or gotten someone with experience in a type on the radio.
But I could imagine a company contemplating building the remote-pilot-for-emergencies service might be scared off by potential liability. Families of pilots killed in GA accidents routinely sue aircraft and engine manufacturers even when the FAA determines the cause to be pilot error.
eternalny1 1635 days ago [-]
This is what some of the new "fully automated" semi-truck companies are doing.
Remote truckers in an office, similar to a UAV drone pilot.
briandear 1635 days ago [-]
Most trucks drive similarly. A Vision Jet is a far different airplane than a Pilatus. Automation is better because the computer is designed for that specific aircraft as opposed to having a bunch of on-call pilots that just so happen to be type rated for that specific plane. And if they aren’t type rated, they are more of a liability. It’s very expensive to get type ratings so that remote pilot concept just wouldn’t scale. A 787 pilot isn’t going to know the intricacies of a Kodiak and besides, what pilot is going to want to sit in a ready-room for a shift for days on end with nothing to do? An incapacitated pilot is so rare that automation is a high enough percentage that it’s a fine solution. There is already a pilot shortage — hiring type rated remote pilots to just sit and wait around isn’t going to be easy.
throw0101a 1634 days ago [-]
> ... what pilot is going to want to sit in a ready-room for a shift for days on end with nothing to do?
Possible scenario: if pilots are already sitting in a simulator for currency training / testing, it may be possible to have the sim be 'reset' to a live feed in an emergency.
You wouldn't have them hang around 'just in case', but rather use people who are already present for some other reason.
Another possibility: pilots are hours-limited for a given time period. If you have pilots that have hit that limit, some may be willing to spend time in a ready-room for a nominal bonus.
tialaramex 1635 days ago [-]
When a truck (or a train) can't see what to do on its own, it can brake to a full stop and remain motionless until a human intervenes. Cell network crashed? Mountain in the way of the transmitter? Somebody stepped on the cable? Whatever it is, most problems will be averted by just always braking to a halt and waiting.
This is not an option in a plane. If it was, this technology wouldn't be needed - if the pilot is incapacitated just brake to a halt and step out of the plane...
usrusr 1635 days ago [-]
A plane entering an ad-hoc holding circle is much less of a risk to its peers than a ground vehicle coming to a stop on the open road.
jacquesm 1635 days ago [-]
That highly depends on where that circle is.
o-__-o 1635 days ago [-]
FYI all major airlines have a sat link to their planes with monitoring. While they don’t have a remote fly by wire link, they can load live data from a plane into a sim and have a pilot on the ground troubleshoot with the troubled craft
kitteh 1635 days ago [-]
Curious if it xmits that on guard or tries to tune to ctaf and do it.
ceejayoz 1635 days ago [-]
I'd imagine given the airport database that it's capable of calling the right frequency. Might do both.
korethr 1635 days ago [-]
I did some searching and found some demo videos. In this video, part of the announcement is audible: https://youtu.be/IcVuubU4BTU?t=90
Starting at 1:30, "NOVEMBER SIX HOTEL LIMA, POSSIBLE PILOT INCAPACITATION, SIXTEEN MILES WEST OF KILO CHARLIE LIMA--" at this point the voiceover talks over the announcement, and I have trouble making it out, but I'm pretty sure I hear a "...LANDING ON RUNWAY..." in there as well. For those of you that don't know pilot jargon, that's the plane's registration number (N6HL), the situation, location relative to the nearest airport (KCL-something), and what I'm pretty is a declaration of intent to land on a specified runway.
So, your guess is correct, what the system does is announce its status and intentions and let ATC clear the way.
Other comments have speculated about uncontrolled fields, but I think that's less likely to be an issue. Per the demo video, the auto-land feature requires a GPS approach with altitude guidance published. If a field can't afford a staffed tower, would it be able to afford to have a published GPS approach with altitude guidance? My intuition says no, but as I'm not a pilot, I could be wrong about that. On possible scenario I could see is that the tower isn't 24x7, and so the field is uncontrolled at night. Perhaps such a field would have a GPS approach published, and if the auto-land selected that field, it would be up to any pilots in the area to be aware of the announcement and get out of the way. AFAIK, having one of your radios monitoring the emergency band is considered best practice, so other pilots in the area should be able to hear the emergency announcement and react appropriately.
But at this point, I'm speculating as well. For all I know, the auto land only selects airports known to have a manned tower at the time of activation.
tialaramex 1635 days ago [-]
There's a frequency for uncontrolled fields the Common Traffic Advisory Frequency. You join the frequency and ordinarily it's silent OR you can hear other pilots who are already in the same area or on the ground, co-ordinating. You listen and build a mental image of anything happening, then as you get closer, even if nobody else spoke yet, you announce your intentions.
The accident plane will be constantly reminding people of its status on this frequency when there isn't a tower. Other pilots will be talking in response to each other but this system can't understand what they're saying. So it will just explain periodically what's going on. Something like:
"Springfield Traffic, November Six Zero Hotel Lima with Emergency Possible Pilot Incapacitation. Final Runway One Six. Full Stop. Runway Will Close After Emergency."
I can definitely imagine, especially when this technology is new, other pilots trying to ask questions
"Zero Hotel Lima, did you say runway will close? I was planning to land there after you. Do you know when it will re-open?"
The system can't understand their question and won't answer, but their training should teach them De Niro's line from Ronin. "When there is any doubt, there is no doubt". Something is wrong, they should divert and leave the emergency plane to do its thing.
The vast majority of reasonable places to land something small like these $2-3M planes will not have a tower at all, and for some of the rest the tower is only part time, but your emergency may not be, so it is usually going to be talking on CTAF and other pilots will just have to make new plans to work around the emergency.
briandear 1635 days ago [-]
Plenty of untowered fields with GPS approaches. Hayward, Palo Alto and Livermore are three that have closed towers at night — to be fair though, the GPS approach at Palo is prohibited at night, but Hayward’s is definitely available. Even untowered Sedona has an RNAV approach.
kejaed 1635 days ago [-]
Yes it’ll squawk emergency transponder and broadcast on the radio.
Stevvo 1635 days ago [-]
In the case of the mountain, the avionics have a terrain database built in, so it can follow an LPV WAAS approach from a fix above the terrain.
I don't know if this can deal with the engine out, but in theory there isn't any reason it couldn't. There is an IPad app called "Xavion". With an engine out, Xavion will calculate an approach for you follow to a suitable airport, based on the aircraft's best glide speed + required runway length. Interestingly it doesn't use the published best glide speed and stopping distances, the app uses your flight history to figure out the aircraft's actual best glide and stopping distance.
o-__-o 1635 days ago [-]
Head and tailwinds are real
saganus 1635 days ago [-]
What kind tech stack/development processes do you think are needed for something like this?
At a very naive level, for example: typed language vs dynamic; formal verification of the code or not (or to what extent); what kind of QA? (can't even imagine how to test this "in production" given the amount of edge cases like the ones you describe; hw and sw redundancy; to name a few.
I have zero experience with airplane software but I find it fascinating considering how safe flying is.
outworlder 1635 days ago [-]
> typed language vs dynamic
You are not approaching this from the correct angle. "dynamic" and "static" types is a red-herring for safety. Yes, when we are rushing some feature in our day jobs we can try to call functions with their wrong types. But these are not critical systems.
If you DO have a critical system, you are going to have to invest _massive_ engineering resources. You are going to exercise all code paths. If you get a "type" error, you haven't done your job correctly. Because this was a code path not exercised before, and that should not happen. The additional type checks at compile time are a drop in the bucket compared to all the testing you have to do.
That said, most such applications will be very traditional. C or C++, maybe ADA. Despite having types, the C family you give you a whole lot more failure scenarios. For instance, it's very easy to corrupt your entire process memory in C, that is something that not many "dynamic" languages will let you do. And yet people build mission critical systems with them.
That's not the only possible answer though. For an interesting autonomous system, please look into NASA's Deep Space 1, in particular the Remote Agent. Written in Lisp, it had spacecraft controls for a few days. It could self-diagnose and correct issues. For a long time, it was the most advanced piece of software to ever control a spacecraft. And Lisp is "dynamic" typed (but strongly typed)
Now, they do test in "production", but it's more like they have lots of staging environments. Some of them may be simulators, some of them may be replicas. At the end of the day, this is no different from any other software: it has inputs (airspeed, altitude, heading, roll, pitch, yaw, servo positions, charts, weather radar, etc) and outputs (controlling the servos, changing radio frequencies, etc). You can simulate some or all of them.
HeyLaughingBoy 1635 days ago [-]
I'd imagine that it begins well before that with Requirements Management: probably more important than any other single thing since that drives the entire development process.
Question: how close are we to totally self-flying planes? I feel like we could easily get there before we got self-driving cars, if we wanted to.
Would the costs for short hops be comparable to a commercial airplane ticket? Because it would be awesome to charter small flights from an app to jump to a nearby city.
> On 24 April 2001, a Global Hawk flew non-stop from Edwards AFB to RAAF Base Edinburgh in Australia, making history by being the first pilotless aircraft to cross the Pacific Ocean. The flight took 22 hours, and set a world record for absolute distance flown by a UAV, 13,219.86 kilometers (8,214.44 mi).[97]
> On 22 March 2008, a Global Hawk set the endurance record for full-scale, operational uncrewed aircraft UAVs by flying for 33.1 hours at altitudes up to 60,000 feet over Edwards AFB.[98]
Unlike Predator/Reaper/etc. drones, the Global Hawk is autonomous, there is no pilot sitting in a faux-cockpit stateside.
kparaju 1635 days ago [-]
Do you know how these drones communicate with the ATC to state their intentions? Is there a flight plan made ahead and plan that they don't deviate from? I could not find any information online.
bronco21016 1635 days ago [-]
The operator is communicating via VHF with ATC. I’m not sure on exactly how the transmissions are handled (via aircraft, or remote radio station?) but the operator is in communication with ATC. If you can find a live ATC feed of Syracuse tower they’re frequently doing touch and go’s there.
kgilpin 1635 days ago [-]
One thing to keep in mind is that any type of auto-fly is dependent on a LOT of automation systems on the plane itself being functional. For example, instruments, sensors, autopilot, auto throttle.
To be considered safe, an auto-fly needs to be able to gracefully degrade as the subsystems in which it depends start to fail. Human pilots are trained to handle this by compensating for system failures in a variety of ways, including compensation (eg in a split flap scenario) and disabling (turning off a misbehaving autopilot). Ultimately, a human pilot can always turn off all the automation and fly the plane by looking out the window (or, in poor conditions, using gyro powered “steam” gauges).
In the case that the pilot is disabled, then auto-land is a great option, even though it’s reliant on so many subsystems. But for an always-on auto-fly, the requirement to gracefully degrade, and degrade, and degrade, and still operate at the level of a human pilot using the “Mark 1 eyeball” is a tough one which hasn’t yet been met (as far as I know).
There’s mention in this discussion of fully automated drones. But, those are basically expendable if there’s a serious system failure, since there are no souls on board.
AWildC182 1635 days ago [-]
Gyro powered steam gauges are all but gone from aviation. The GA fleet is even shedding them at a promising rate. MEMS based independent systems with backup power are solid state and far more reliable than a janky vacuum pump driven by the engine running a couple clockwork instruments.
mixedCase 1635 days ago [-]
Sorry to be a pedant but since it took me a second to get it at first: "all but gone" implies that they're definitely still here, I think something like "almost gone" or "almost out of use" would be the right phrasing.
Denvercoder9 1635 days ago [-]
all but is an expression meaning almost. See e.g. https://grammarist.com/usage/all-but/. It's one of the most confusing English expressions I've encountered.
I don't see how that's relevant. _They can and will still fail_
What happens then they do?
AWildC182 1635 days ago [-]
You have more than one independent system. A typical glass panel install will have a primary ADAHRS (air data attitude and heading reference system which contains a MEMS magnetometer, gyro, accelerator, pitot static pressure transducers, and processor) and a secondary ADAHRS both connected to the primary flight displays. Should one fail, you have a fallback for your PFD. As a backup, were you would normally have a vacuum gyro, you have a small glass panel (the garmin offering is the G5) which contains it's own built in ADAHRS and battery and will continue running even with the entire aircraft electrical system disabled.
kgilpin 1634 days ago [-]
Most of the GA fleet is still vacuum powered for backup.
AWildC182 1634 days ago [-]
Why do people keep parroting this? I know of exactly zero aircraft currently produced that are retaining the vacuum system and I've seen very few retrofits that retain the vacuum on the engine. The aircraft in operation with vacuum systems use them as primary systems but are moving away from it with each annual.
forgottenpass 1635 days ago [-]
>Because it would be awesome to charter small flights from an app to jump to a nearby city.
I doubt the cost of a pilot's time alone is a big enough factor to meaningfully change the number of people with access to chartered flights.
The other costs (hours of plane time, fuel, ramp fee, parking fees, maintenance) probably dwarf pilot time as a percentage of total cost. And you're either pushing the absolute unreliability of aviation [0] to the customers who are now trapped in a different city, or they're paying even more to the app to have backup plans ready to roll.
[0] Commercial aviation deals at a scale that can absorb flights that don't keep their plan. You go to the counter, get rebooked, and angrily eat some shitty fast food. When something goes wrong on a private flight, you're pacing around on the tarmac at 1 am, 3 states away from home and have to be at work in the morning.
PacketPaul 1635 days ago [-]
We have them now, just not passenger carrying. Military drones are autonomous.
Isn't that a situation where a machine would excel? One challenge is the abundance of decisions with only one non-deadly option, the other challenge is lack of time. The first challenge is solved by well-defined decision trees and mental checklists, but those make the second challenge harder. Computers don't need to balance between checklist thoroughness and decision latency, they can look at all the data they have in practically zero time.
Mandatory bad car analogy: a driver will often prefer a faster response over spending time to check the rear view mirror before slamming the brakes, a computer would never have reasons to do so, they can check without meaningful delay.
nradov 1635 days ago [-]
No this isn't a situation where a machine would excel because it can't handle unexpected failure modes for which is hasn't been programmed. Human pilots can often come up with a "good enough" solution based on understanding fundamental principles without having any prior experience. For example, the pilots on US Airways flight 1549 intentionally changed and disregarded parts of the checklist for handling a dual engine failure because it wasn't a perfect fit for the actual conditions at the time.
l33tman 1635 days ago [-]
Yes I agree.. As long as the system can simulate the degraded plane, and is fast enough, it can brute force through a huge number of decision trees and scenarios in milliseconds to find the optimal. A human would do something similar but will prune the tree much more heavily than the computer as the human is slow. This is analogous to any chess engine, the difference is that the plane flight requires a much more difficult simulation scenario compared to a chess board. The system has to understand or at least measure what has degraded as well which might be difficult.
(I don't mean to make it sound as I think it's easy to solve, but the basic strategy to solving it is simple :)
ssully 1635 days ago [-]
The basic strategy is simple, but implementing it is not. I think a perfect real world example is Tesla's recent roll out of their summon feature. The basic strategy of having your autonomous car pull out of a parking spot and pick you up at the door is simple, but the actual implementation shows how difficult that actually is.
asdfman123 1635 days ago [-]
There's probably a wide range of unusual, one-off edge cases that almost never happen which would be impossible or difficult to find.
And maybe catching/handling them properly would involve more sensors, when people really just want a well-trained human who is able to improvise in the cockpit.
It would be difficult code a machine to find a good landing spot in extremely variable terrain. For instance, I saw a video of a plane safely crash-landing landing on a four-lane highway with traffic. It would be impractical to code something to handle that very rare situation.
usrusr 1635 days ago [-]
I'm not a pilot, but the by far most dangerous time to have an engine problem is the period that starts the moment you have accelerated too much to safely stop the plane on the ground and that ends with having sufficient speed and altitude to glide back to an emergency landing. There surely are defined procedures for reaching the least deadly outcome for every phase within that period (basically a lookup table based on accumulated energy, with different input options, with either time or airspeed and altitude is proxies for accumulated energy). Being well trained just means applying those rules with minimum hesitation.
Even experience cannot be much of a factor on top of that, as very few pilots will ever experience a scenario like that outside the simulator. My layman's suspicion, honed in the MCAS debates, tells me that the only other thing experience and human "general intelligence and gut feeling" can add to the equation is educated guesswork regarding which data to distrust when things just don't add up consistently due to a malfunction.
throw0101a 1635 days ago [-]
Yup:
> V_1 is the critical engine failure recognition speed or takeoff decision speed. It is the speed above which the takeoff will continue even if an engine fails or another problem occurs, such as a blown tire.[9]
The plane has to keep going until V_2 (or V_2_min).
tim333 1634 days ago [-]
>very few pilots will ever experience a scenario like that outside the simulator
One thing that no doubt helped with Sullenberger was he was a hobby glider pilot where that kind of situation comes up regularly if in a much less dangerous way as gliders are slow and light.
vidarh 1635 days ago [-]
This is what companies like Lilium are aiming for [1], and they're aiming for passenger operations starting in 2025 on a "taxi" type basis, probably initially with a pilot on board, though from what I understand this is largely because they don't expect to get approval for autonomous operation from day one. Of course there's no guarantee they'll meet that target, but they're also just one of many companies working on this.
There's been discussions for years on whether or not the level of automation in modern aircraft causes pilot training to lapse due to misuse. Self-driving planes are much easier than self-driving cars because there is empty space on all sides of the plane pretty much at all times. Autopilot is already generally speaking "a thing", with the exception of takeoff and landing.
Bear in mind even in takeoff and landing scenarios, unlike a public roadway, the airplane has pretty exclusive use of the runway as well.
Pilots are very unlikely the primary cost of aircraft trips. Things like jet fuel are probably much more of the cost driver.
forgottenpass 1635 days ago [-]
>I feel like we could easily get there before we got self-driving cars, if we wanted to.
The environment has shown quite clearly that we don't want to. We'd probably already have it if we did.
The safety design of aviation relies on having multiple highly competent people in the loop on every flight and exercising their judgement on dozens of things. And that's for the best-case scenario, they also have to be capable of choosing and executing fallback plans when part of the overall system (the plane, air traffic, radio navigation, flying conditions, ground conditions, etc...) degrades or enters an unexpected state.
Stevvo 1635 days ago [-]
The technology already exists, it's a much easier problem than self driving cars. Spacecraft can fly themselves to other planets and return. That is a massively more complex problem.
It's a problem of trust, and regulation, not a technical one.
rdevsrex 1635 days ago [-]
No doubt this is real engineering. I'm sure they had to do a lot of software verification work.
savrajsingh 1635 days ago [-]
I’d hope that autoland connects to Garmin HQ and then they can coordinate and also just call up the tower and tell them what’s going on. Managing airspace and radio communications is the tricky part imo
neom 1635 days ago [-]
I'd presume the plane will also start to squawk 7700, shouldn't be an issue then.
FabHK 1634 days ago [-]
Autoland will squawk the emergency code 7700 on the transponder, and announce itself on the emergency frequency 121.5 and the local CTAF (common traffic advisory frequency, IIRC, which coincides with tower frequency if the airport is towered).
kawfey 1635 days ago [-]
Uncontrolled airspace is much more of a concern, since there is no tower HQ can call.
dsfyu404ed 1635 days ago [-]
>but what happens when...
You handle those things manually by setting proper inputs to the normal non-emergency autopilot or flying without autopilot like you would in any other aircraft equipped with an autopilot that is capable of landing. I assume "one off" approaches are a non issue because they are using a database of supported airports with the necessary approach details since they change slowly and the list is short enough. That's traditionally how this kind of thing is handled.
This is not a replacement for a pilot and is not portrayed as such.
michaelmior 1635 days ago [-]
It will be insanely impressive if it actually performs well in those scenarios :)
__m 1635 days ago [-]
Well the plane crashes i suppose
rubicon33 1635 days ago [-]
It's just shortest path traversal no?
Represent each airport as a node in a graph with all relevant data (distance, weather, etc.) ... Traverse the graph and find the shortest path.
Confused as to why this is being downvoted. If there's a better way to implement it, by all means, lets discuss that! It's an interesting tech challenge... why just downvote?
tonyarkles 1635 days ago [-]
I agree with you!
The word "just" in their post may be prickly. Also, it's not really a graph search as stated, just a "choose the airport with the lowest weight". That, in theory, chooses the airport to land at, but not... the rest of it.
Yes, choosing a route would be essentially a graph search, with weather at intermediate nodes adding to edge weights, etc, but even after you've computed a target path, you're going to be continually refining that path (e.g. the thunderstorm moves in a way you didn't predict). And... flying the aircraft itself.
Autopilot in straight & level flight isn't too big of a deal. Autopilot tracking a path is doable (including ascent/decent). Auto-throttle is common on larger airliners but not in GA aircraft. Automatically configuring landing gear and flaps, as appropriate for weather conditions, is (afaik) not done automatically even in commercial airliners. And doing all of this, reliably, with the assumption that the pilot is incapacitated... that's friggin' cool!
Yes. Or I can just copy-paste what's in my browser's URL bar by pressing <ctrl-l><ctrl-c>. :)
cyberferret 1635 days ago [-]
Maybe a coincidence, but Cirrus Aircraft announced their SafeReturn Emergency Autoland on their Vision Jet series today as well [0]. Looks pretty impressive. A passenger can just press one button on the roof behind the pilot, and the aircraft will send a distress signal, re-route and autoland the aircraft at the nearest airport (including terrain and weather avoidance) and also convert all screens on board to inform the passengers how to use the radio for comms etc.
They are both using the Garmin Autonomi Autoland system.
ianhawes 1635 days ago [-]
FWIW Cirrus also has a Cirrus Airframe Parachute System that is standard in all models.
crooked-v 1635 days ago [-]
The autoland system will even give passengers instructions on how to activate CAPS if there are no airports in range it knows how to land at.
jillesvangurp 1635 days ago [-]
Sounds very similar to something Austin Meyer (creator of x-plane) implemented a few years ago called Xavion: http://xavion.com/
This is an ipad app that calculates a best glidepath to the best runway and guides you to the runway safely. It's intended for emergency situations when you lose an engine and quickly have to decide on an airport/runway. However, it sort of snowballed into an app with a lot of situational awareness features.
But he actually experimented with hooking that up to a plane at some point to create a self landing system: https://www.x-plane.com/2014/07/xavion-brings-a-real-world-a.... Not sure if he ever shipped that feature. I imagine there might be some certification hassle :-).
rexaliquid 1635 days ago [-]
Similar, but also kind of the opposite. Xavion is for when you have a functioning pilot, but a malfunctioning plane. Emergency Autoland is for when you have a functioning plane, but not a functioning pilot.
jsmith45 1635 days ago [-]
Austin Meyer did help on an actual autoland device that was based on the same concept: the VP-400 by Vertical Power. But I'm not sure it ever went anywhere. In theory with that system, you could push the "oh-shit" button if you lose your engine, and it would take over the autopilot to try to automatically fly the calculated path.
Of course I don't think it was as fully integrated, so no automatic radio callouts or anything.
I'm not sure if the product actually ever became available.
HOWEVER: If you have a TruTrak autopilot, and an an iLevil ADS-B receiver, then Xavion has a super experimental "auto" button that will actually control the autopilot, to attempt to automatically fly the calculated course.
nabla9 1635 days ago [-]
Garmin Autoland is emergency only autoland.
Not to be confused with CAT II/III autoland used in normal operations.
campfireveteran 1635 days ago [-]
Btw, here's probably the only actual cat IIIC landing video on YT:
For anyone else wondering what "emergency only autoland" means:
From Wikipedia: "The feature is activated by a guarded red button on Garmin G3000 NX avionics, evaluating winds, weather and fuel reserves to select a suitable diversion airport and taking over the aircraft controls to land, it advises the ATC and displays instructions to occupants."
From the Garmin marketing site [1]: "Garmin Autoland. It takes complete control of the flight to land the airplane in an emergency where the pilot is unable to fly1."
I'm not exactly sure if this is the correct reference for CAT II/III autoland, but seems like the purpose of CAT II/III autoland is to land and aircraft when the pilot would otherwise have a hard time manually landing due to weather conditions (ie. limited visibility) [2]. But if someone has a more accurate description, please correct me!
Edit: Just to clarify the reason for posting this versus just relying on the text in the press release, I was under the impression the announcement was for some fully-automated flight control system (ie. take off and landing without a pilot on board, a la self-driving cars) based on the press release not mentioning why the system would be activated.
throw0101a 1635 days ago [-]
Cat II/III use ILS which send out signals on the runway(s) in question. IIRC, those signals need to be monitored to make sure they're with-in certain tolerances because II/III is used in minimal visibility conditions, so there's very little time to correct things at the last minute. It's about trusting a whole bunch of equipment to work properly because you're basically flying with a blind fold on otherwise.
This Garmin G3000-based system primary uses GPS/WAAS (and perhaps VORs) to get location data, so accuracy may not be with-in necessary tolerances for day-to-day use, but it's better than nothing for emergencies.
kejaed 1635 days ago [-]
The marketing videos say the airport needs to have a published GPS approach.
sokoloff 1635 days ago [-]
GPS WAAS is good only down to 200 and 1/2 (200’ above ground cloud base and 1/2 mile visibility underneath)
Cat II ILS can go down to 100 and 1200RVR (100’ bases and 1200’ of runway visual range)
Cat IIIc can go down to 0/0.
200 and 1/2 is perfectly usable for most day to day weather and is certainly good enough for unexpectedly incapacitated pilot.
nabla9 1635 days ago [-]
CAT II/III can land with limited visibility.
CAT IIIc is interesting because there is no decision height and no runway visual range limitation. Pilots can approach and land completely blind without flying with the stick at all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gthcuZV8agI
Big airports with CAT IIIc can stay open for CAT IIIc available aircraft in all visibility conditions.
throw0101a 1635 days ago [-]
And then you have to taxi in that pea soup. :)
nabla9 1635 days ago [-]
I think they send somebody with light to help you if you get lost.
Yes, both are implementing Garmin's new emergency autoland feature.
heelix 1635 days ago [-]
Very cool option. The rocket propelled parashoot ^h^h parachute essentially totals the aircraft when used. Even a crash at post touchdown landing speeds is likely easier on those on board.
The autopilot features available to GA and experimental aircraft are quite impressive for holding things at a specific ask in various weather conditions. Not uncommon to have the autopilot active when flying in IFR conditions to help with some of the workload.
Assuming the plane has GPS, a correct altimeter setting, and airspeed - between the instruments you get a reasonable amount of cross checking for accuracy and enough information to calculate your vector. If you actually fly/land at the speeds recommended, most of the time landing will be pretty uneventful.
Many of the tablet/phone based GPS only solutions will give a pretty solid estimation of engine out glide distance too. You (should) pitch for 'best glide' speeds and in combination with the airport data bank with the GPS unit, know where you can get to. I'll push the 'direct to' nearest button and try for it were it in glide range. This sounds like it just connected all the automation dots.
A good landing is where everyone leaves the plane safely. A great landing allows the plane to be used again. I suspect this is going for a good landing... which is fantastic news for the passenger.
dghughes 1635 days ago [-]
>...parashoot
A typo but that slip created a great brand name for a rocket-propelled parachute the "ParaShoot".
heelix 1635 days ago [-]
ah god damn it. I was just coming back to make an edit as enough coffee registered the mistake.
mothsonasloth 1635 days ago [-]
Interesting to use the word HALO, seeing as its already used as an acronym in aviation for High Altitude Low Opening.
Yes, but in a very different context. While both are "aviation", military aviation and commercial aviation are pretty isolated from each other.
dweekly 1635 days ago [-]
Cirrus announced their version of this yesterday for their Cirrus Jet, they are calling the feature Safe Return. Also incorporates 7700, TAWS escape, wind check, pax 121.5 simplified radio controls, everything.
Man the headline borderline is incomprehensible. Here's the actual article headline: Piper Announces New M600 SLS. First GA Aircraft to be Standard Equipped with HALO™ Safety System and Autoland Capability
I'm assuming GA means generally available?
reaperducer 1635 days ago [-]
GA is General Aviation, I believe. I've been to EAA, but I'm not an airplane person so I could be wrong.
rwc 1635 days ago [-]
General aviation (non-commercial)
heyflyguy 1635 days ago [-]
GA = General Aviation
mc32 1635 days ago [-]
I think it means General Aviation (civil aircraft).
code4tee 1635 days ago [-]
This is impressive. Use case is for an incapacitated pilot. It won’t work well or at all if the aircraft itself is having issues or in other emergency scenarios. As such it doesn’t replace the need for qualified pilots at the controls.
asdfadsfgfdda 1635 days ago [-]
I suspect they are marketing this for incapacitated pilots (an extremely rare situation), but it also seems like an alternative for overwhelmed pilots. They don't want to call their potential customers idiots, but this is another feature to help pilots avoid loss of control.
And I definitely see a future version that could handle engine failures. If you can count on auto land to flawlessly glide to the nearest airport, who needs a twin engine airplane? Single engine airplanes are significantly cheaper to operate than twins.
Stevvo 1635 days ago [-]
Title is innaccurate, as the m600 is not the first, it will be simultaneously made available accross several different aircraft with Garmin avionics. The system can be also be retrofitted in older aircraft.
rexaliquid 1635 days ago [-]
Aircraft still have to certify the feature, now that it exists. The title is accurate in that the m600 will be the first to certify with Autoland. Other aircraft will follow.
jonplackett 1635 days ago [-]
Question: A private jet is obviously bad for the environment, but how does a propeller plane compare carbon-wise to driving a car the same distance?
carleverett 1635 days ago [-]
Not good. A Cessna 172 cruises at 140 mph and burns 8.5 gph of 100LL fuel, the equivalent of 16.5 mpg, and this is at cruise speed, not accounting for taxi, run-up, and flying the pattern during a normal flight.
Not to mention we're still burning lead in most propeller aircraft as well.
Fortunately this isn't a very popular way of getting around.
jonplackett 1635 days ago [-]
It’s interesting that it’s not insanely bad. I assumed it would be maybe 2-10X worse but it’s in a similar ballpark.
Would a full on private jet be way worse?
Would these planes carry a fair few people than a car? If so what’s it like taking passenger numbers into account?
I guess super-rich folk probably would be happy to fly just themselves in a big private jet and also be travelling waaaay further than they ever would in a car so it’s probably a silly comparison anyway
asdfadsfgfdda 1635 days ago [-]
There's actually a huge range in private planes. This M600 plane does about 7 mpg, 250 knots at 45 gph. A typical light jet might do 400 knots at 125 gph (3 mpg). But a light jet cannot not fly nonstop to a different continent. For these trips, a large business jet might do 450 knots at 300 gph (1.5 mpg), but only the very super rich can actually afford these. Even most celebrities will be flying the airlines for long international trips.
jonplackett 1634 days ago [-]
Thanks for the calculations! It’s weird how a more advance technology like a jet can be so successful yet an order of magnitude less economical. Usually it’s the reverse. But when you’re rich it’s time that’s money
capekwasright 1634 days ago [-]
The short answer is that higher speeds come at a steep price. The relationship between velocity and the power required to overcome drag at that velocity is cubic, so that large business jet requires on the order of 50x more power to fly at 450 kts than it would flying at 120 kts, like the little Cessna might.
AWildC182 1635 days ago [-]
Piston engines are more efficient than turboprops which are more efficient than turbofan/turbojet engines. Newer piston engines are by far the most efficient option but are not used frequently as the piston fleet is very old.
To compare to a car, just using vehicle efficiency (not per passenger) a typical cessna is in the realm of a full size SUV in terms of carbon footprint. Both are about 10-15 mpg. The aircraft in the article is far worse but only because it's rather large and turbine powered. Optimized designs like the Long-EZ can easily hit in excess of 30mpg cruising at 160mph.
segmondy 1635 days ago [-]
But planes fly in straighter lines and will use less distance to get to their destination compared to cars. So you can't really use mpg. Best will be to measure gallons used per hour.
AWildC182 1635 days ago [-]
Depends on the route. Flying IFR you can get routed all over the place. Also, head/tailwinds exist. It's more just to show ballpark relative efficiency numbers.
kgilpin 1635 days ago [-]
A typical single engine piston plane might fly at 130kts burning 10 gallons of aviation fuel (100LL) per hour. Or, roughly 15 statute miles per gallon. More efficient options are available on modern planes. Most of the fleet is old though.
kgilpin 1635 days ago [-]
Maybe the best case scenario is a small modern plane flying a Rotax 912, making about 24 mpg on standard auto fuel.
heyflyguy 1635 days ago [-]
Pretty neat tech, and an interesting alternate ending from the "pinch hitter" courses being taught by CFIs across the country.
ChicagoBoy11 1635 days ago [-]
The tech is still interesting, even if similar things that are used even in non-emergency scenarios have existed in large jets for a few decades. The one thing I don't understand is if it always just relies on WAAS and GPS no matter what, or, if depending on the runway it chooses to land, it may use something like an ILS.
tialaramex 1635 days ago [-]
It won't try to do ILS. I think the issue is that where GPS is available it can definitely put that plane down. Maybe it's not the world's greatest landing due to GPS inaccuracy, not right on the centre line, tries to put the gear through the floor - maybe the airframe ends up totalled, but if every passenger on the plane walks away it's a huge success given the pilot was incapacitated. Whereas for ILS that gets you down under clouds in mediocre weather, all lined up properly, but (except in airports with Cat III ILS) it doesn't actually put you on the ground. With a trained pilot in the seat that's not an issue, once they can see the runway they can do the rest, but this is for emergencies.
As I mentioned in a previous HN item about ILS, these autoland systems don't get you off the runway. For a grave emergency (pilot dropped dead in flight with their spouse and two kids onboard) that's forgiveable, and this mentions that the product begins broadcasting that the runway chosen is now unusable (because your plane is now parked on it) but this is why Cat IIIc doesn't magically allow JFK to function normally in a blizzard. When the pilots still can't see the runway even after their plane lands on it, that's not useful for routine passenger flights.
throw0101a 1635 days ago [-]
> I think the issue is that where GPS is available it can definitely put that plane down. Maybe it's not the world's greatest landing due to GPS inaccuracy, not right on the centre line, ...
I wonder how this will change when the L2, L5, and L1C signals start becoming used from the GPS III satellites.
Also, in the US, non-GPS/Navstar signals cannot officially be used for anything, though I think Galileo was recently (finally) approved by the FCC:
(The issue was something like: once officially approved, the frequencies in questions cannot be used for anything else, and are protected.)
Animats 1634 days ago [-]
The system, which is from Garmin, includes a radio altimeter, a short-range radar pointed straight down. So it's not reliant on GPS for precise vertical position during landing. This allows the system to do a proper landing flare just above the runway.
throw0101a 1635 days ago [-]
I ran across a report somewhere that more airports (in the US) now have RNAV approaches than ILS ones. ILS equipment isn't cheap, and so many places don't have it.
But a lot of folks now have GPS, especially because of the ADS mandate, and so while most probably aren't IFR-rated, I'm guessing if you're flying a turboprop or Cirrus jet, they probably are.
base698 1635 days ago [-]
I have a Garmin 530 and it's IFR rated, most of the 430s are too and relatively common in single engine planes. The ADS mandate was more for transponders.
It does seem like a lot of airports have RNAV only and if they have an ILS they also have an RNAV.
throw0101a 1635 days ago [-]
I was under the impression that more that just having a magic box was needed for a plane to be IFR-rated.
Not sure what HN is getting all excited about ... the Piper M600 is $3 million, and since Mexico is humid, they've had composite delamination problems ...
Or you can just pull the throttle to idle, and trim for Vx, which is the "descend through clouds" emergency procedure.
mtw 1635 days ago [-]
Does this aircraft have LIDAR or cameras? Wondering how it works with other air traffic and potential collisions. This is one of the biggest challenges for self-driving cars and I can't see any details about this in the Garmin G3000
Stevvo 1635 days ago [-]
The G3000 has ADBS in/out, and from January 1st ADSB out will be mandatory in the US, so it will know where other traffic is. Additionally, the autoland talks to ATC, and ATC can tell other traffic to get out of the way.
lm28469 1635 days ago [-]
Even without that the chances of two planes colliding is nowhere near what autonomous vehicle are facing. + a lidar wouldn't do much in the air, it can't see very far, that's why we have radars.
kgilpin 1635 days ago [-]
In an emergency, all the other traffic will be cleared out of the way.
sansnomme 1635 days ago [-]
How does it communicate with ground station? Voice recognition and speech synthesis?
jimktrains2 1635 days ago [-]
I have 100% no familiarity, but I'd assume it's not processing voice from the ground. It is probably only announcing that this is an emergency and its intended course of action.
I would love to know if that's not true because that would be a huge leap in off-line speech processing and recognition.
FabHK 1634 days ago [-]
It's announce only (though it avoids running over other communication on the frequency).
owlninja 1635 days ago [-]
>digital technology that safely lands the aircraft at the nearest suitable airport in the event that the pilot is incapacitated.
How does it know? Also a weird submission to be at the top of HN
It pretty much works like you'd imagine, with the addition that a passenger could engage it if required.
owlninja 1635 days ago [-]
Thanks for the link!
>In the M600 Autoland application, the system activates at 18,000 feet if the autopilot is engaged and the pilot doesn’t interact with the avionics in a 15-minute period. At higher altitudes, the engagement period is shorter. Autoland also tries to alert the pilot with repeated chiming sounds and asking, “Are you alert” before engaging.
lucideer 1635 days ago [-]
> weird submission to be at the top of HN
Seems like the usual HN fare. Autonomous control of vehicles is a very common topic here.
beerandt 1635 days ago [-]
A self-driving car article makes the front page seemingly several times per week, but an article on a self-landing GA plane is weird?
maeln 1635 days ago [-]
Plane are also a very common topic on HN.
tialaramex 1635 days ago [-]
Lack of input.
Whether it's a train, a boat or in this case an aeroplane, an aware and capable operator will periodically fiddle with things a little bit, change the heading slightly, tweak engine power a bit, any little change shows you're paying attention still, no need for the machine to intervene. If that doesn't happen for a sustained period, the machine prods them. "Hey are you awake? Let me know you're OK" or moral equivalent. If they still do nothing after a further period, engage emergency systems. On a boat that means summoning the rest of the crew to come see what's wrong on the bridge, on a train it means you just bring the train to a halt and let a remote signaller communicate with anybody else on board, on a plane this system proposes to try landing.
Also a passenger can just (be taught how to) activate it.
SideburnsOfDoom 1635 days ago [-]
> How does it know?
Know the nearest airport, or know if the pilot is incapacitated?
1) GPS and 2) it looks like someone in the aircraft has to press a button.
throw0101a 1635 days ago [-]
It needs to be manually invoked by a passenger.
Robotbeat 1635 days ago [-]
Sounds like something that, once it becomes perfected, could reduce the required number of pilots on commercial passenger aircraft from 2 to 1 (at least for smaller planes).
antoineMoPa 1635 days ago [-]
$2.994M. Guess I'll just ride my bike then.
Stevvo 1635 days ago [-]
They mentioned it can be retrofitted in older aircraft. So it might be an option in the future if you are doing $100k panel upgrade in your 1950s tin can airplane.
tialaramex 1635 days ago [-]
As the plane gets older and less sophisticated it gets harder to put all the pieces of the puzzle together without ripping the whole aircraft to pieces and starting over.
Even after touching down, the aircraft this is built for have computer control for the brakes and full rudder authority, so it can do a pretty good approximation of a proper short field landing based on GPS and wheel speed sensors. Do you want to add computer controlled brakes and wheel speed sensors to your tin can? No? Then we have to assume the plan is to just roll to a halt and that cuts our list of viable landing sites and hurts survivability considerably.
1635 days ago [-]
briandear 1635 days ago [-]
And Cirrus announced the same thing. This isn’t type specific but a characteristic of the new Garmin G3000.
caseyf7 1635 days ago [-]
Why do they cost $3M?
supernova87a 1635 days ago [-]
The labor, insurance, and safety / regulatory certifications required of a low volume production aircraft.
FabHK 1634 days ago [-]
Only about 1000 single-engine piston aircraft are sold every year worldwide, and only about 500 single-engine turboprop.
It's a market with higher certification requirements, but much smaller unit volume than boats and cars, so much more certification, R&D, admin cost has to be covered by each unit sold.
There are already plenty of airplanes that have the ability to land themselves under specific conditions. There's no whole-new technology here. Even if it was brand new, I'm not sure how that would be less safe.
Stevvo 1635 days ago [-]
For parachutes it was only true until Cirrus put out training to encourage people to actually use the parachute.
Once pilots were properly trained, the parachutes started saving lives. It was the same story when ejector seats were introduced.
The emergency autoland is not intended to be used by the pilot, it is for activation by a passenger in single pilot aircraft when the pilot is incapacitated. So their is almost nothing to train. Pilots just need to add it to the passenger briefing.
stanski 1635 days ago [-]
This is only for emergencies, similar to the parachute system on Cirrus aircraft. I'm sure sooner or later someone somewhere would be very glad to have this.
Quenty 1635 days ago [-]
It’s intended for small aircraft where the pilot might be incapacitated or something. Imagine someone having a heart attack mid flight with their kid onboard or something.
nsxwolf 1635 days ago [-]
A Cessna pilot and a Cirrus pilot walk into a bar. Bartender says what will you have. Cessna pilot orders a Jack and Coke. Cirrus pilot pulls his chute.
dsfyu404ed 1635 days ago [-]
If this system doesn't alert the outside world that it's been used more than a few intoxicated people are gonna use it to land at uncontrolled airports. Just get close and press the magic button.
Net safety will probably increase because most people will never have that use case though.
technofiend 1635 days ago [-]
Funny, but no. It definitely alerts people and those kind of alerts come with consequences. Declaring an emergency will trigger a later review by the FAA with potential action from them ranging from nothing at all to removing the pilot's license.
rkangel 1635 days ago [-]
It will advertise an emergency on the radio and with the transponder, so that ATC can clear traffic out of the way.
Rendered at 14:10:54 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Because it's an emergency feature engaged by a passenger or automatically, it probably can't manage all complex situations. It may be just good weather emergency landing. Check fuel and wind, steer to nearest emergency airport and land. Best effort is better than no effort and dying.
> There is a mountain between the normal 3-degree glide-slope and the runway, an "offset approach"
I think it can land only to those airports that are it's database with landing approaches programmed it.
Cruise missiles have had similar technology for a long time.
During those first few seconds after I hit the Autoland button, the system went through a series of complex calculations and decision-making processes to determine the nearest suitable runway based on runway length, width, and surface; fuel remaining; crosswind component; terrain; obstacles; and general weather information. The system requires an RNAV approach, but beyond that, the runway and weather criteria can be decided by the airframe manufacturer.
The system even forecasts its own weather if the nearest suitable runway is a significant distance away, long enough that the current ADS-B or SiriusXM weather may not be valid. It uses the latest weather trend information, for example, to determine if a thunderstorm might move into the runway environment where it intends to land. It will route the airplane around thunderstorms as well as terrain and obstacles, all of which it gets from its internal databases. If en route to a runway it determines, because of changing weather conditions, that another runway is closer or more suitable, it will change its destination. It can even estimate changing barometric conditions and adjust the altimeter—using algorithms. Garmin engineers say the calculated barometric readings are within 0.01 inches of mercury of actual ambient conditions.
I try to make my landings a little less eventful.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SM-62_Snark
Until GPS guidance came into use they were relatively crude terrain followers requiring a preloaded flight plan over a known terrain profile with sufficient bumpiness to protect against IMU drift. Nothing at all like this technology.
Yeah but an average human couldn't, and thankfully still cannot buy one. This is feature on a (and more to come) civilian aircraft, two very different things.
Even then, it's problematic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...
Cruise missiles aren't trying to survive the landing.
so that's where Boeing got the idea for 737MAX!
"The routing algorithm determines a path to the Final Approach Fix (FAF) of the chosen published approach that avoids terrain, obstacles, and significant weather."
That handles all of your contingencies except an engine failure. If you have an engine failure and a pilot who can't dead-stick a landing you're probably screwed. But you're still no worse off in that case than you would have been without autoland.
I seem to remember reading like 4 or more years ago, that there was an experimental autoland system actually powered by that software, and could autoland in a dead stick situation.
EDIT: Found the experimental engine-out auto-land system based on the same technology as xavion: It is called the VP-400 by Vertical Power. I'm not sure if it ever became a purchasable product.
We can require more training for GA, but the training burden is already pretty high, and the GA industry is still shrinking last time I checked. Boosting safety requirements in the form of additional training for GA may save a few lives, but also those gains could be simply because there will be fewer hobby pilots.
The fact is that GA planes falling out of the sky just doesn't kill very many people. It obviously feels terrible to the families involved in a crash, but relative to automotive deaths, lung cancer, murders, etc, it is a tiny tiny blip in the numbers. Obviously being a GA pilot boosts your chance of dying in a small airplane crash, in the same way that learning to ride a motorcycle boosts your chance of dying in a motorcycle crash. The alternative of killing off recreational flying, is worse.
I'd be interested to know if it declares an emergency, squawks 7700 and controllers are expected to give it a priority and right of way?
Regardless, the machine will be broadcasting its intentions and again, there's no arguing with a machine other pilots will just have to accept that it's intending to land and stop on the runway putting it out of use until further notice.
Since the machine can't see lights, I assume it doesn't care whether they are functioning. So in the dark it's likely to land at some small airfield which is actually closed, slightly scary for the passengers to just come to a halt in darkness far from anywhere but arguably safer since nobody else is going to make the error of landing when the runway remains occupied.
No need:
> [Autoland] would update and broadcast that message every 30 seconds—listening to make sure that it didn’t transmit over any other radio calls. Once near the Class D airspace of the tower, it would have changed one of the radios to the tower frequency and kept the other on the emergency frequency.
Then, once landed, it will brake, and then broadcast that the runway is inop due to airplane on the runway.
Quite amazing.
https://www.aopa.org/News-and-Media/All-News/2020/January/Pi...
What I’m trying to say is that the auto land functionality is not a feat, it’s like self parking cars.. been around for 20 years just now cost efficient and safe enough for the masses to use. In a boeing 787, the pilot still needs to squawk 7777 and they should try comms, don’t know why a GA plane would be different..
This is much more impressive, not the least of which because the system itself figures out the best place to land (taking into account operational constraints), how to get there (taking into account weather avoidance), and how to be at the right speed, altitude, configuration, etc. to perform the final approach to landing.
So to use your analogy, getting a bit closer to a self-driving car than just self parking!
The system being discussed is for when you no longer have a pilot.
And if the aircraft is low on fuel or isn't making enough power to make that runway... Well, the usual happens - a forced landing, aka a crash landing.
I don't think this is meant to be used as a cop-out by the pilot. "My engine quit! You deal with this, computer!"
Closure: certainly a problem.
Mountain: can use worldwide topographic information in its database to route around. See AVweb
Crosswind: mentions getting local weather.
Engine: Autland cannot help. But on the Cirrus you'd pull the CAPS cord and float down.
> > There are very few emergencies (in my opinion) in which parachute deployment would be the appropriate response unless there was an extremely unfortunate set of circumstances which led to the airplane being unable to fly or glide (like a wing snapping off)
> I've been a Cirrus instructor for 15 years. This attitude is completely wrong and is exactly what has led more people to be killed than needed to be, especially when Cirruses first came to the market and the chute was a new thing in production aircraft. We TEACH, intentionally, people to ask FIRST, "do I need to use the chute," and the answer is never "no." It's either, "Yes," or "not yet."
> There have been pilots - plenty of them - that had every opportunity to use the chute but kept gliding, or spinning, or whatever, and now they and their passengers are dead.
[...]
> Lose the engine - most of the time, pull the chute. Yes, even better than landing in a nice open field. The chute works. If I screw up the landing, or the field has ditches, furrows, irrigation, cows, power lines, fences, rocks, or who knows what else, I might just be screwed setting a plane down at 65-70kts. But not if I float down into it protected by my roll cage, high-g seats, air bags, etc.
[...]
* https://old.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/dp61qo#f5trzyz
Well of course they do.
CAPS does a pretty good job putting an upper bound on the worst case result. They don't care if you screw your plane up because that's a known cost and you'll pay it back through premiums if you keep flying.
Dead sticking it has a very good chance of being no more expensive than a normal landing if you find a runway and not all that expensive if you find a good field or empty highway (i.e. a big towing bill) so of course most pilots would prefer to dead stick. But this comes with a small chance of you crashing into a daycare and maxing out your policy. The insurers do not want this.
Most decent pilots with good situational will be able to make the correct call between CAPs and dead sticking it. They're telling you to go CAPS all the time because they have to deal with idiot pilots too. It's the same reason every drivers ed program emphasizes brakes, brakes, brakes, despite the steering wheel being a far better way to avoid many problems. They don't trust you to make the call.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28539144
I know of a skydive place that does or at least used to regularly (like once or twice a week) dead stick it in a C182 because they would fly with the bare minimum of fuel (when you're flying up and down all day even a little extra weight costs a lot of money).
At least a non-pilot co-passenger might want to try their luck gliding to open area and then pulling it.
A fall of 10 feet puts you at ~17 mph when you hit. 20mph is a good approximation.
You’ll go wherever the wind pulls you. And might hit the side of something faster than 20mph before hitting the ground.
And hitting a crowd at 20mph.
Chute pulls are almost 100% survivable. Landing in a field is a much lower percentage. Just hitting nearly invisible power lines can slice a plane in half. You also have a fire danger when landing off airport. And many dead engine landings result in landing short of the field.
You aren’t going to get ridicule from the Cirrus community for pulling the chute and even if you did, it’s less ridicule than crash landing into a field that looked suitable from 2000 feet up.
It's almost impossible to tell what the situation is on the ground until it's too late--an unnoticed ditch can kill you.
* https://cirrusaircraft.com/totalsafety/
Which would suggest that if you need to be vectored to a runway, the aircraft can negotiate that with ATC automatically (and perhaps ATC can advise which is the most appropriate diversion?) This in the situation where the pilot is incapacitated, but the aircraft isn't in an immediate risk of crashing (e.g. you're cruising, but there's bad weather immediately below you).
It should also be able to use stuff like D-ATIS to get airport conditions.
That seems optimistic though, perhaps it just announces its intentions and hopes ATC clears a path?
I strongly suspect it just announces itself.
"N123FOO DECLARING EMERGENCY; PILOT INCAPACITATED, AUTOLAND ENGAGED; CLEAR RUNWAY 21L; 12 MILES OUT" sort of stuff.
(It'd probably also be significantly more expensive, due to the need for a subscription.)
But I could imagine a company contemplating building the remote-pilot-for-emergencies service might be scared off by potential liability. Families of pilots killed in GA accidents routinely sue aircraft and engine manufacturers even when the FAA determines the cause to be pilot error.
Remote truckers in an office, similar to a UAV drone pilot.
Possible scenario: if pilots are already sitting in a simulator for currency training / testing, it may be possible to have the sim be 'reset' to a live feed in an emergency.
You wouldn't have them hang around 'just in case', but rather use people who are already present for some other reason.
Another possibility: pilots are hours-limited for a given time period. If you have pilots that have hit that limit, some may be willing to spend time in a ready-room for a nominal bonus.
This is not an option in a plane. If it was, this technology wouldn't be needed - if the pilot is incapacitated just brake to a halt and step out of the plane...
Starting at 1:30, "NOVEMBER SIX HOTEL LIMA, POSSIBLE PILOT INCAPACITATION, SIXTEEN MILES WEST OF KILO CHARLIE LIMA--" at this point the voiceover talks over the announcement, and I have trouble making it out, but I'm pretty sure I hear a "...LANDING ON RUNWAY..." in there as well. For those of you that don't know pilot jargon, that's the plane's registration number (N6HL), the situation, location relative to the nearest airport (KCL-something), and what I'm pretty is a declaration of intent to land on a specified runway.
So, your guess is correct, what the system does is announce its status and intentions and let ATC clear the way.
Other comments have speculated about uncontrolled fields, but I think that's less likely to be an issue. Per the demo video, the auto-land feature requires a GPS approach with altitude guidance published. If a field can't afford a staffed tower, would it be able to afford to have a published GPS approach with altitude guidance? My intuition says no, but as I'm not a pilot, I could be wrong about that. On possible scenario I could see is that the tower isn't 24x7, and so the field is uncontrolled at night. Perhaps such a field would have a GPS approach published, and if the auto-land selected that field, it would be up to any pilots in the area to be aware of the announcement and get out of the way. AFAIK, having one of your radios monitoring the emergency band is considered best practice, so other pilots in the area should be able to hear the emergency announcement and react appropriately.
But at this point, I'm speculating as well. For all I know, the auto land only selects airports known to have a manned tower at the time of activation.
The accident plane will be constantly reminding people of its status on this frequency when there isn't a tower. Other pilots will be talking in response to each other but this system can't understand what they're saying. So it will just explain periodically what's going on. Something like:
"Springfield Traffic, November Six Zero Hotel Lima with Emergency Possible Pilot Incapacitation. Final Runway One Six. Full Stop. Runway Will Close After Emergency."
I can definitely imagine, especially when this technology is new, other pilots trying to ask questions
"Zero Hotel Lima, did you say runway will close? I was planning to land there after you. Do you know when it will re-open?"
The system can't understand their question and won't answer, but their training should teach them De Niro's line from Ronin. "When there is any doubt, there is no doubt". Something is wrong, they should divert and leave the emergency plane to do its thing.
The vast majority of reasonable places to land something small like these $2-3M planes will not have a tower at all, and for some of the rest the tower is only part time, but your emergency may not be, so it is usually going to be talking on CTAF and other pilots will just have to make new plans to work around the emergency.
I don't know if this can deal with the engine out, but in theory there isn't any reason it couldn't. There is an IPad app called "Xavion". With an engine out, Xavion will calculate an approach for you follow to a suitable airport, based on the aircraft's best glide speed + required runway length. Interestingly it doesn't use the published best glide speed and stopping distances, the app uses your flight history to figure out the aircraft's actual best glide and stopping distance.
At a very naive level, for example: typed language vs dynamic; formal verification of the code or not (or to what extent); what kind of QA? (can't even imagine how to test this "in production" given the amount of edge cases like the ones you describe; hw and sw redundancy; to name a few.
I have zero experience with airplane software but I find it fascinating considering how safe flying is.
You are not approaching this from the correct angle. "dynamic" and "static" types is a red-herring for safety. Yes, when we are rushing some feature in our day jobs we can try to call functions with their wrong types. But these are not critical systems.
If you DO have a critical system, you are going to have to invest _massive_ engineering resources. You are going to exercise all code paths. If you get a "type" error, you haven't done your job correctly. Because this was a code path not exercised before, and that should not happen. The additional type checks at compile time are a drop in the bucket compared to all the testing you have to do.
That said, most such applications will be very traditional. C or C++, maybe ADA. Despite having types, the C family you give you a whole lot more failure scenarios. For instance, it's very easy to corrupt your entire process memory in C, that is something that not many "dynamic" languages will let you do. And yet people build mission critical systems with them.
That's not the only possible answer though. For an interesting autonomous system, please look into NASA's Deep Space 1, in particular the Remote Agent. Written in Lisp, it had spacecraft controls for a few days. It could self-diagnose and correct issues. For a long time, it was the most advanced piece of software to ever control a spacecraft. And Lisp is "dynamic" typed (but strongly typed)
Now, they do test in "production", but it's more like they have lots of staging environments. Some of them may be simulators, some of them may be replicas. At the end of the day, this is no different from any other software: it has inputs (airspeed, altitude, heading, roll, pitch, yaw, servo positions, charts, weather radar, etc) and outputs (controlling the servos, changing radio frequencies, etc). You can simulate some or all of them.
Anyway, I'm sure there used to be a blog for the Dreamliner test team, but I can't find it now, so here's this instead: https://www.wired.com/2010/03/a-look-inside-the-brains-of-bo...
And specifically for code, look here: https://ldra.com/aerospace-defence/standards/misra-cc/
and (JSF, not commercial) https://www.f35.com/about/life-cycle/software
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178C
Would the costs for short hops be comparable to a commercial airplane ticket? Because it would be awesome to charter small flights from an app to jump to a nearby city.
A couple highlights from the Records section:
> On 24 April 2001, a Global Hawk flew non-stop from Edwards AFB to RAAF Base Edinburgh in Australia, making history by being the first pilotless aircraft to cross the Pacific Ocean. The flight took 22 hours, and set a world record for absolute distance flown by a UAV, 13,219.86 kilometers (8,214.44 mi).[97]
> On 22 March 2008, a Global Hawk set the endurance record for full-scale, operational uncrewed aircraft UAVs by flying for 33.1 hours at altitudes up to 60,000 feet over Edwards AFB.[98]
Unlike Predator/Reaper/etc. drones, the Global Hawk is autonomous, there is no pilot sitting in a faux-cockpit stateside.
To be considered safe, an auto-fly needs to be able to gracefully degrade as the subsystems in which it depends start to fail. Human pilots are trained to handle this by compensating for system failures in a variety of ways, including compensation (eg in a split flap scenario) and disabling (turning off a misbehaving autopilot). Ultimately, a human pilot can always turn off all the automation and fly the plane by looking out the window (or, in poor conditions, using gyro powered “steam” gauges).
In the case that the pilot is disabled, then auto-land is a great option, even though it’s reliant on so many subsystems. But for an always-on auto-fly, the requirement to gracefully degrade, and degrade, and degrade, and still operate at the level of a human pilot using the “Mark 1 eyeball” is a tough one which hasn’t yet been met (as far as I know).
There’s mention in this discussion of fully automated drones. But, those are basically expendable if there’s a serious system failure, since there are no souls on board.
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/all+but
What happens then they do?
I doubt the cost of a pilot's time alone is a big enough factor to meaningfully change the number of people with access to chartered flights.
The other costs (hours of plane time, fuel, ramp fee, parking fees, maintenance) probably dwarf pilot time as a percentage of total cost. And you're either pushing the absolute unreliability of aviation [0] to the customers who are now trapped in a different city, or they're paying even more to the app to have backup plans ready to roll.
[0] Commercial aviation deals at a scale that can absorb flights that don't keep their plan. You go to the counter, get rebooked, and angrily eat some shitty fast food. When something goes wrong on a private flight, you're pacing around on the tarmac at 1 am, 3 states away from home and have to be at work in the morning.
Mandatory bad car analogy: a driver will often prefer a faster response over spending time to check the rear view mirror before slamming the brakes, a computer would never have reasons to do so, they can check without meaningful delay.
(I don't mean to make it sound as I think it's easy to solve, but the basic strategy to solving it is simple :)
And maybe catching/handling them properly would involve more sensors, when people really just want a well-trained human who is able to improvise in the cockpit.
It would be difficult code a machine to find a good landing spot in extremely variable terrain. For instance, I saw a video of a plane safely crash-landing landing on a four-lane highway with traffic. It would be impractical to code something to handle that very rare situation.
Even experience cannot be much of a factor on top of that, as very few pilots will ever experience a scenario like that outside the simulator. My layman's suspicion, honed in the MCAS debates, tells me that the only other thing experience and human "general intelligence and gut feeling" can add to the equation is educated guesswork regarding which data to distrust when things just don't add up consistently due to a malfunction.
> V_1 is the critical engine failure recognition speed or takeoff decision speed. It is the speed above which the takeoff will continue even if an engine fails or another problem occurs, such as a blown tire.[9]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_speeds
The plane has to keep going until V_2 (or V_2_min).
One thing that no doubt helped with Sullenberger was he was a hobby glider pilot where that kind of situation comes up regularly if in a much less dangerous way as gliders are slow and light.
[1] https://lilium.com/newsroom-detail/taking-to-the-skies-fligh...
Bear in mind even in takeoff and landing scenarios, unlike a public roadway, the airplane has pretty exclusive use of the runway as well.
Pilots are very unlikely the primary cost of aircraft trips. Things like jet fuel are probably much more of the cost driver.
The environment has shown quite clearly that we don't want to. We'd probably already have it if we did.
The safety design of aviation relies on having multiple highly competent people in the loop on every flight and exercising their judgement on dozens of things. And that's for the best-case scenario, they also have to be capable of choosing and executing fallback plans when part of the overall system (the plane, air traffic, radio navigation, flying conditions, ground conditions, etc...) degrades or enters an unexpected state.
It's a problem of trust, and regulation, not a technical one.
You handle those things manually by setting proper inputs to the normal non-emergency autopilot or flying without autopilot like you would in any other aircraft equipped with an autopilot that is capable of landing. I assume "one off" approaches are a non issue because they are using a database of supported airports with the necessary approach details since they change slowly and the list is short enough. That's traditionally how this kind of thing is handled.
This is not a replacement for a pilot and is not portrayed as such.
Represent each airport as a node in a graph with all relevant data (distance, weather, etc.) ... Traverse the graph and find the shortest path.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm
Easier said than done I'm sure ;)
The word "just" in their post may be prickly. Also, it's not really a graph search as stated, just a "choose the airport with the lowest weight". That, in theory, chooses the airport to land at, but not... the rest of it.
Yes, choosing a route would be essentially a graph search, with weather at intermediate nodes adding to edge weights, etc, but even after you've computed a target path, you're going to be continually refining that path (e.g. the thunderstorm moves in a way you didn't predict). And... flying the aircraft itself.
Autopilot in straight & level flight isn't too big of a deal. Autopilot tracking a path is doable (including ascent/decent). Auto-throttle is common on larger airliners but not in GA aircraft. Automatically configuring landing gear and flaps, as appropriate for weather conditions, is (afaik) not done automatically even in commercial airliners. And doing all of this, reliably, with the assumption that the pilot is incapacitated... that's friggin' cool!
* https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/garmin-announces-emergen...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-ruFmgTpqA
* https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/general-aviation/201...
Also Cirrus:
* https://cirrusaircraft.com/totalsafety/#safereturn
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiGkzgfR_c0
https://youtu.be/d-ruFmgTpqA
^ I saw this in my feed before this HN article.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiGkzgfR_c0
Looks like Garmin coordinated the announcement.
This is an ipad app that calculates a best glidepath to the best runway and guides you to the runway safely. It's intended for emergency situations when you lose an engine and quickly have to decide on an airport/runway. However, it sort of snowballed into an app with a lot of situational awareness features.
But he actually experimented with hooking that up to a plane at some point to create a self landing system: https://www.x-plane.com/2014/07/xavion-brings-a-real-world-a.... Not sure if he ever shipped that feature. I imagine there might be some certification hassle :-).
Of course I don't think it was as fully integrated, so no automatic radio callouts or anything.
I'm not sure if the product actually ever became available.
HOWEVER: If you have a TruTrak autopilot, and an an iLevil ADS-B receiver, then Xavion has a super experimental "auto" button that will actually control the autopilot, to attempt to automatically fly the calculated course.
Not to be confused with CAT II/III autoland used in normal operations.
https://youtu.be/gthcuZV8agI
From Wikipedia: "The feature is activated by a guarded red button on Garmin G3000 NX avionics, evaluating winds, weather and fuel reserves to select a suitable diversion airport and taking over the aircraft controls to land, it advises the ATC and displays instructions to occupants."
From the Garmin marketing site [1]: "Garmin Autoland. It takes complete control of the flight to land the airplane in an emergency where the pilot is unable to fly1."
I'm not exactly sure if this is the correct reference for CAT II/III autoland, but seems like the purpose of CAT II/III autoland is to land and aircraft when the pilot would otherwise have a hard time manually landing due to weather conditions (ie. limited visibility) [2]. But if someone has a more accurate description, please correct me!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland#Emergency_autoland
[1] https://www.garmin.com/en-US/autonomi/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system#ILS_...
Edit: Just to clarify the reason for posting this versus just relying on the text in the press release, I was under the impression the announcement was for some fully-automated flight control system (ie. take off and landing without a pilot on board, a la self-driving cars) based on the press release not mentioning why the system would be activated.
This Garmin G3000-based system primary uses GPS/WAAS (and perhaps VORs) to get location data, so accuracy may not be with-in necessary tolerances for day-to-day use, but it's better than nothing for emergencies.
Cat II ILS can go down to 100 and 1200RVR (100’ bases and 1200’ of runway visual range)
Cat IIIc can go down to 0/0.
200 and 1/2 is perfectly usable for most day to day weather and is certainly good enough for unexpectedly incapacitated pilot.
CAT IIIc is interesting because there is no decision height and no runway visual range limitation. Pilots can approach and land completely blind without flying with the stick at all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gthcuZV8agI
Big airports with CAT IIIc can stay open for CAT IIIc available aircraft in all visibility conditions.
The autopilot features available to GA and experimental aircraft are quite impressive for holding things at a specific ask in various weather conditions. Not uncommon to have the autopilot active when flying in IFR conditions to help with some of the workload.
Assuming the plane has GPS, a correct altimeter setting, and airspeed - between the instruments you get a reasonable amount of cross checking for accuracy and enough information to calculate your vector. If you actually fly/land at the speeds recommended, most of the time landing will be pretty uneventful.
Many of the tablet/phone based GPS only solutions will give a pretty solid estimation of engine out glide distance too. You (should) pitch for 'best glide' speeds and in combination with the airport data bank with the GPS unit, know where you can get to. I'll push the 'direct to' nearest button and try for it were it in glide range. This sounds like it just connected all the automation dots.
A good landing is where everyone leaves the plane safely. A great landing allows the plane to be used again. I suspect this is going for a good landing... which is fantastic news for the passenger.
A typo but that slip created a great brand name for a rocket-propelled parachute the "ParaShoot".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_military_parachu...
There is also TALO, which stands for Tactical Air Landing Operation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjJdISjq8Wg
https://cirrusaircraft.com/cirrus-aircraft-revolutionizes-pa...
I'm assuming GA means generally available?
And I definitely see a future version that could handle engine failures. If you can count on auto land to flawlessly glide to the nearest airport, who needs a twin engine airplane? Single engine airplanes are significantly cheaper to operate than twins.
Not to mention we're still burning lead in most propeller aircraft as well.
Fortunately this isn't a very popular way of getting around.
Would a full on private jet be way worse?
Would these planes carry a fair few people than a car? If so what’s it like taking passenger numbers into account?
I guess super-rich folk probably would be happy to fly just themselves in a big private jet and also be travelling waaaay further than they ever would in a car so it’s probably a silly comparison anyway
To compare to a car, just using vehicle efficiency (not per passenger) a typical cessna is in the realm of a full size SUV in terms of carbon footprint. Both are about 10-15 mpg. The aircraft in the article is far worse but only because it's rather large and turbine powered. Optimized designs like the Long-EZ can easily hit in excess of 30mpg cruising at 160mph.
As I mentioned in a previous HN item about ILS, these autoland systems don't get you off the runway. For a grave emergency (pilot dropped dead in flight with their spouse and two kids onboard) that's forgiveable, and this mentions that the product begins broadcasting that the runway chosen is now unusable (because your plane is now parked on it) but this is why Cat IIIc doesn't magically allow JFK to function normally in a blizzard. When the pilots still can't see the runway even after their plane lands on it, that's not useful for routine passenger flights.
I wonder how this will change when the L2, L5, and L1C signals start becoming used from the GPS III satellites.
Also, in the US, non-GPS/Navstar signals cannot officially be used for anything, though I think Galileo was recently (finally) approved by the FCC:
* https://www.gsa.europa.eu/newsroom/news/fcc-approves-use-gal...
(The issue was something like: once officially approved, the frequencies in questions cannot be used for anything else, and are protected.)
But a lot of folks now have GPS, especially because of the ADS mandate, and so while most probably aren't IFR-rated, I'm guessing if you're flying a turboprop or Cirrus jet, they probably are.
It does seem like a lot of airports have RNAV only and if they have an ILS they also have an RNAV.
One mnenonic is GRABCARD
Generator Radios Attitude indicator Ball Clock Adjustable altimeter Rate of turn indicator Directional gyro
Or you can just pull the throttle to idle, and trim for Vx, which is the "descend through clouds" emergency procedure.
I would love to know if that's not true because that would be a huge leap in off-line speech processing and recognition.
How does it know? Also a weird submission to be at the top of HN
The plane could sound an alarm for you to check in if it thinks you're not conscious.
Edit: More details at https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/general-aviation/201...
It pretty much works like you'd imagine, with the addition that a passenger could engage it if required.
>In the M600 Autoland application, the system activates at 18,000 feet if the autopilot is engaged and the pilot doesn’t interact with the avionics in a 15-minute period. At higher altitudes, the engagement period is shorter. Autoland also tries to alert the pilot with repeated chiming sounds and asking, “Are you alert” before engaging.
Seems like the usual HN fare. Autonomous control of vehicles is a very common topic here.
Whether it's a train, a boat or in this case an aeroplane, an aware and capable operator will periodically fiddle with things a little bit, change the heading slightly, tweak engine power a bit, any little change shows you're paying attention still, no need for the machine to intervene. If that doesn't happen for a sustained period, the machine prods them. "Hey are you awake? Let me know you're OK" or moral equivalent. If they still do nothing after a further period, engage emergency systems. On a boat that means summoning the rest of the crew to come see what's wrong on the bridge, on a train it means you just bring the train to a halt and let a remote signaller communicate with anybody else on board, on a plane this system proposes to try landing.
Also a passenger can just (be taught how to) activate it.
Know the nearest airport, or know if the pilot is incapacitated?
1) GPS and 2) it looks like someone in the aircraft has to press a button.
Even after touching down, the aircraft this is built for have computer control for the brakes and full rudder authority, so it can do a pretty good approximation of a proper short field landing based on GPS and wheel speed sensors. Do you want to add computer controlled brakes and wheel speed sensors to your tin can? No? Then we have to assume the plan is to just roll to a halt and that cuts our list of viable landing sites and hurts survivability considerably.
It's a market with higher certification requirements, but much smaller unit volume than boats and cars, so much more certification, R&D, admin cost has to be covered by each unit sold.
See eg. https://dsm.forecastinternational.com/wordpress/2019/02/26/2...
It's probably like having a parachute on the plane: just a great marketing sales point.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28539144
There are already plenty of airplanes that have the ability to land themselves under specific conditions. There's no whole-new technology here. Even if it was brand new, I'm not sure how that would be less safe.
Once pilots were properly trained, the parachutes started saving lives. It was the same story when ejector seats were introduced.
The emergency autoland is not intended to be used by the pilot, it is for activation by a passenger in single pilot aircraft when the pilot is incapacitated. So their is almost nothing to train. Pilots just need to add it to the passenger briefing.
Net safety will probably increase because most people will never have that use case though.