If you're one of the many developers at Garmin who worked on this, I can't imagine a better Christmas gift!
[flagged]
no.
Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe
91–100 of 193 posts
Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe
#92Garmin 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.
The one bright side is that when I switched from Apple Watch to Garmin I couldn’t stand the notifications UX. It finally got me to turn off watch notifications and I feel much freer.
Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Doesn’t autoland count as software??
Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
One major difference is if a uav crashes no one dies. But in china there is apparently now a commercial pilotless flying ev taxi service - which is autonomous with a human on the ground in the loop as you are suggesting.
Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
And also — sadly — Monkey C. I cannot imagine what possessed them to invent their own scripting language for wearable device apps. It's sort of like JavaScript but worse and with minimal third-party tooling support. https://developer.garmin.com/connect-iq/monkey-c/
it kinda sucks, but with the constraints it's at least understandable. they wanted an extremely lightweight language with a bytecode VM which could be ported to whatever MCUs in 2015, while also strictly limiting the functionality for battery usage reasons (and, uh, product segmentation/limiting third party access).
These days I'd say "sounds like wasm" but I guess 2015 was a bit before that took off.
Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe
#96This is Garman SafeReturn, and this is its first real save.
Here's a demo.[1] It's been shipping since about 2020, originally on the Cirrus Vision Jet. There's a lot going on. The system is aware of terrain, weather, and fuel, but not of runway status. So it gives the ground a few minutes to get ready, sending voice emergency messages to ATC.
If you watch the flight track, you can see the aircraft circle several times, some distance from the airport, then do a straight-in approach. It sets up for landing, wheels down, flaps down, lands, brakes, and turns of the the engine. It doesn't taxi. Someone from the ground will have to tow or taxi the aircraft off the runway.
It's mostly GPS driven, plus a radar altimeter for landing.
The system can be triggered by a button in the cockpit, a button in the passenger area, and a system that detects the pilot isn't making any inputs for a long period or the aircraft is unstable and the pilot isn't trying to stabilize it. The pilot can take control back, but if they don't, the airplane will be automatically landed.
Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took issue with calling out the airport, multiple times in full phonetics, both at the beginning and the end of the transmission. All other callsigns, perfectly reasonable.
At an untowered field, saying the airport name at the beginning and end of each transmission is standard phraseology.
In phonetics?q
Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does the AF 449 crash have to do with the existence of a button to return the aircraft to wings level + zero vertical speed? To answer your question though, LVL has been around for close to two decades now. IIRC there was a Cirrus/Garmin partnership that added it to the latter's G1000/GFC 700 and it's since trickled out to other consumer-grade autopilots.
The AF 449 was in a stall, and the pilots panicked and did exactly the wrong thing. The pilot came out of the lavatory and immediately realized what was wrong, and pushed the stick forward. But it was too late. If the captain could figure it out, so could the computer. I recall another crash, not so long ago, of a commuter plane where the wings iced up a bit and the airplane stalled. The crew kept trying to pull the…
> a commuter plane where the wings iced up a bit and the airplane stalled. The crew kept trying to pull the nose up, all the way to the ground.
There’s probably a lot that match, but sounds like Colgan Air 3407 in 2009 (the last major commercial airline crash in the US before the mid-air collision earlier this year in DC)
Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
[flagged]
Please don't fulminate or introduce political flamebait on HN
Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don’t have self driving cars.
I've confirmed with my own 2 eyes cars driving on the road without humans in them. I've also rode in a Waymo which had no driver. They definitely exist. Teslas also have self driving.
These people are basically Moon-landing deniers. They crop up a lot these days, sadly. I wish they'd crop up somewhere else.