An airplane has, for the first time, automatically landed itself after an in-flight emergency, according to the system’s manufacturer.
Two people emerged unscathed from the Beechcraft Super King Air 200 after it stopped on the runway at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport near Denver, according to video posted by emergency responders.
The twin-engine turboprop landed under the control of Garmin’s Autoland system, which the company says is now installed on about 1,700 airplanes. “This was the first use of Autoland from start-to-finish in an actual emergency,” Garmin said in a statement.
Well no, the whole point of the news event was the supposedly real emergency. Autoland has worked in testing and training for yearrs. This time it was basically credited with saving humans, but it didn’t do that. Instead it surfaced a bug in its own progamming, it sounds like.
What bug? It worked as it was supposed to.
There was a loss of cabin pressure (a real emergency) and it decided the pilots were unresponsive. The pilots could have taken control back, but by not doing that, they were functionally unresponsive. I don’t see a bug here.
The first automatic landing of a commercial airliner was apparently in 1965. So yeah it was just the entire process for this individual emergency system by this company being call a first as well. 60 years ago apparently we succeeded, which makes sense, 4 years before we landed on the moon, believe that was 69’
Not only that, the soviet shuttle, Buran, autolanded, uncrewed, from space, in 1988