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Piper Announces First GA Aircraft with Autoland Capability

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Re: Piper Announces First GA Aircraft with Autoland Capability

#171
post #62
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> Cruise missiles have had similar technology for a long time. I try to make my landings a little less eventful.

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.

Re: Piper Announces First GA Aircraft with Autoland Capability

#172

Interesting to use the word HALO, seeing as its already used as an acronym in aviation for High Altitude Low Opening. 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

Yes, but in a very different context. While both are "aviation", military aviation and commercial aviation are pretty isolated from each other.

Re: Piper Announces First GA Aircraft with Autoland Capability

#173

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 comme…

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 so…

> 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.

Re: Piper Announces First GA Aircraft with Autoland Capability

#174
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 requ…

[deleted]

Re: Piper Announces First GA Aircraft with Autoland Capability

#175
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 way…

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.

I don't see how that's relevant. _They can and will still fail_

What happens then they do?

Re: Piper Announces First GA Aircraft with Autoland Capability

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've had truly autonomous long-range flight since 1998 with the RQ-4A Global Hawk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_RQ-4_Global_H... 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 re…

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.

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.

Re: Piper Announces First GA Aircraft with Autoland Capability

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A 20mph vertical impact into someone's roof really isn't the worst of outcomes.

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.

Re: Piper Announces First GA Aircraft with Autoland Capability

#178

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 comme…

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 so…

The FAA has a lot to say about how software gets onto planes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178C

Re: Piper Announces First GA Aircraft with Autoland Capability

#179
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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.

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.

Re: Piper Announces First GA Aircraft with Autoland Capability

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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 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?
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