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Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

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Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#31
post #30

Absolutely amazing. Well done, Garmin. Imagine getting to go to work everyday to work on something that actually saves lives. Fantastic systems engineering work.

You'd be even more impressed if you saw just how little resources they have to use (ram, storage, cpu), or how old of a C standard they have to work with. I have a few friends that work on this.

I am indeed impressed but not at all surprised considering what we used to get to the moon!

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#32
post #5

The computer announcing the pilot incapacitation is at 11:50.

Amazing how bad the speech synthesis is for something so safety critical.

Then again I understood exactly what it was saying every time, which is more than I can say for some of the other traffic on that recording. I’m not sure synthetic-sounding means bad here.

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#33
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the audio replays I heard had silence cut out, but the aircraft transmits every two minutes, for about twenty seconds each. It does share the information I'd want to hear in an uncontrolled environment, but in a busy towered class delta it likely needs to be shortened. They had plenty of advance warning of this aircraft being inbound and cleared the airspace well before it arrived, but if it had happened with…

The only complaint is it uses phonetics for everything multiple times in each transmission, I'm a radio guy, I would use phonetics once, then otherwise spelled out letters - aka, "whiskey lima foxtrot" and WLF the next time I needed to say it.

This is not how communication is done in aviation. Instead, it’s common to abbreviate to the last three alphanumerics of tail numbers (so “niner alpha bravo” for N789AB) after the first call — but this is conditional on not having a potentially confusing other aircraft on frequency (N129AB), and the system here can’t reasonably know that, so must take the conservative option.

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#34
post #6

I've ridden on a King Air a few times. Surprised how fast the thing was, traveling west to east we sustained 600mph ground speed. Also pretty quiet interior given it's powered by turboprops.

350mph true cruise airspeed for the stock aircraft, so I suspect you had a bit of a tailwind there.

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#35

There needs to be a button on the console of every airplane which is "return the airplane to straight and level".

All modern autopilot systems I've flown have have a LVL (or equivalent) button.

When did that happen? I recall the Air France crash over the Atlantic where the pilots got disoriented. And many others, like JFKjr's crash.

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#36

Absolutely amazing. Well done, Garmin. Imagine getting to go to work everyday to work on something that actually saves lives. Fantastic systems engineering work.

“ Imagine getting to go to work everyday to work on something that actually saves lives.”

I work on medical devices that improve and save lives but the work actually kind of sucks. You spend most of your time on documentation and develop with outdated tools. It’s important work but I would much prefer “move fast and break things”. So much more interesting.

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#38

Absolutely amazing. Well done, Garmin. Imagine getting to go to work everyday to work on something that actually saves lives. Fantastic systems engineering work.

“ Imagine getting to go to work everyday to work on something that actually saves lives.” I work on medical devices that improve and save lives but the work actually kind of sucks. You spend most of your time on documentation and develop with outdated tools. It’s important work but I would much prefer “move fast and break things”. So much more interesting.

Not to invalidate your experience, but I think both of you feel this way because “you only want what you don’t have”. There are different kinds of joy that come from being impactful, and different kinds that come from moving fast. If only we could move fast and be impactful :’(

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#40

Why doesn't it always autoland? We already have self driving cars, so a self flying plane seems imminent.

Because it requires specific equipment that many airports do not have, for one. It also doesn't understand things like noise abatement procedures. It has to be setup properly. You don't want pilots forgetting how to fly the airplane. Any of a dozen other reasons.
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