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Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

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Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#81
I wonder if a human is in the loop. Obviously the software is hardly ever used (a good thing), so you wouldn't need many humans available. If communication is possible, wouldn't you hand control to a pilot on the ground?

I don't know that they could actually fly the plane - is latency too high for landing? - but they could make all the decisions and communicate with air traffic control, other planes, and the passengers.

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#82

There are rumors that there were 2 pilots aboard, and that one of them accidentally triggered autoland, and they couldn't figure out how to turn it off: https://vansairforce.net/threads/garmin-emergency-autoland-i...

There's a rumor, that you are propagating. One person, Tandem46, made this claim ... no evidence provided.

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#83

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

did you see the disruption to air traffic? everyone that needed to land had to go into a holding pattern. the plane was communicating to tower and was going to land since it was emergency. it was not observing other traffic, part of landing is knowing the location of other aircrafts to avoid collision. This doesn't seem to have collision detection/avoidance and space coordination with other aircrafts and entering holding pattern to delay programming yet. This is a good start.

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#85

Garmin really is setting a standard for modern engineering. Hard to think of another company that still has solid engineering for both consumer and industrial applications.

The hardware side is routinely impressive. The software and business sides leave a lot to be desired.

Yeah, have they ever actually used a garmin product? The hardware and the sound effects are excellent. Everything else is barely functional.

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#86
post #81

I wonder if a human is in the loop. Obviously the software is hardly ever used (a good thing), so you wouldn't need many humans available. If communication is possible, wouldn't you hand control to a pilot on the ground? I don't know that they could actually fly the plane - is latency too high for landing? - but they could make all the decisions and communicate with air traffic control, other planes, and the passenge…

Without even getting into latency, just consider the fact that you could lose the signal altogether

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#87
post #81

I wonder if a human is in the loop. Obviously the software is hardly ever used (a good thing), so you wouldn't need many humans available. If communication is possible, wouldn't you hand control to a pilot on the ground? I don't know that they could actually fly the plane - is latency too high for landing? - but they could make all the decisions and communicate with air traffic control, other planes, and the passenge…

Without even getting into latency, just consider the fact that you could lose the signal altogether

So then it's handed off to the autopilot and you are no worse off. But as much as possible, I'd much rather have a human pilot in control.

Militaries have been flying UAVs for awhile now, which must have the same challenges.

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#89

Garmin really is setting a standard for modern engineering. Hard to think of another company that still has solid engineering for both consumer and industrial applications.

You've obviously never used Garmin software. It's always been woeful and lags well behind the rest of the industry.

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ 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.

What is in this particular case that requires outdated tools? If they are code, certainly you can write them on VS Code or whatever you likes, and only need to compile and load on the original tools, can’t you?

You need tracability from requirements down to lines of code. It's a very painstaking process.
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