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.

  • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
    10·
    1 day ago

    This falls in the same category as the MCAS crashes. An automated system wrested control from the pilots, and the system evidently could not be disabled. That is the exact scenario that caused the MCAS crashes.

    The only thing though, is that is absolutely not what happened here, at all.

    Here’s a quote from the (quite short) article:

    Autoland “automatically engaged exactly as designed when the cabin altitude exceeded the prescribed safe levels” and the pilots “made the decision to leave the system engaged,” Townsley said

    The pilots saw the warnings and presumably could have taken over by doing just about anything, but with no passengers to put in jeopardy, they decided to sit back and see what happened.

    There is no flaw here, no bug, this is not a problem. This is what happens when everything works.

    Edit: Well, not everything was working, that beechcraft does have to have its pressurization system checked out for sure.