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.
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).