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.
Yeah I think that’s going too far.
Look, the fact that this has never been needed before is a testament to how often all the redundant safety systems work the way they’re supposed to. It’s not like there’s a problem here.
That said, when the auto-land system was triggered it worked as it was supposed to, landed the plane safely, radio’d its intentions, and nobody was injured. Keep in mind it was triggered during an actual emergency, exactly when it’s supposed to. If the pilots weren’t familiar enough with the safety systems on their plane to disable the auto-land functionality, then they’re functionally ceding control of the plane to the emergency systems, and at that point it’s correct for the automated systems to take over. In this case it seems the pilots decided not to take control back. So really, this was just the safety protocols working as intended.
I’m glad everyone including the pilots were fine though, that really is the most important thing.
I almost wonder if it is smarter to have the autoland not be possible to turn off if pilots were for example hypoxic / mentally incapacitated.
Heh, good luck trying to push an automation technology that a pilot can’t disable. You’re right, there probably are situations where that makes sense, but they would be very rare edge cases. And pilots really do hate being taken out of the control loop. Ideally they really don’t want there to be any computer action that doesn’t have an override (which I think generally makes sense).