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 You spend most of your time on documentation and develop with outdated tools.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.
Well, I'm glad it's that slow. I can't shake the idea of the horrors it would be to get a glucose pump whose software has been vibe-coded.
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 :’(
I could be fast and impactful. Just in a negative way. The problem is that I come from the software dev side so I tend to be less interested in the medical side. It’s the same in a lot of safety critical. There is a lot of mundane work to tick the necessary checkboxes. There isn’t much that is interesting from a technological side. Maybe the result is interesting but getting there takes a lot of extremely boring work…
Maybe you should change your line of work. If you're that unhappy about what you do in spite of the fact that what you do is orders of magnitude more important than the next move-fast-and-break-things-advertising-driven-unicorn then that suggests to me that you should let someone else take over who does derive happiness from it and you get yours from a faster paced environment.
Personally, you couldn't pay me enough to do the latter and I'd be more than happy to do the former (but I'm not exactly looking for a job).
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.
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 hol…
If they designed it to be used for every landing those issues would be resolved. The rarer you use features like this, the more disruptive they will be.
The hardware side is routinely impressive. The software and business sides leave a lot to be desired.
Cane to say the same. I have a Garmin "smart" watch (with every app notification etc disabled) and I love the fact that I can do almost two weeks of exercises (ride, walk, gym) without needing to charge it. The bike computers are also solid. But sadly the UX of the software on these leaves a bunch to be desired, and I've been bitten by many software and firmware bugs in the last years... Including months for which HR…
That’s just most heart rate monitors. Often it isn’t enough conductivity (add water before activity) or the battery is low
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.
If anything, the tail number does not matter nearly as much. A plane with auto land presumably already has ADSb out (almost certainly 1090ES), is squawking 7700, and is probably already IFR anyway. As in this situation, the controllers knew well in advance they had an emergency inbound and who it was. At an uncontrolled field, I need something to tag (robotic "bravo-romeo" is plenty) and a relative position. Bonus if…
I’m not sure I agree. Not sure I disagree, either. If I’m another pilot in the air when this occurs, it feels like the most important things for me to know are (1) stay the hell away from the runway, and the announced approach, for a while; (2) only a single aircraft is doing an emergency autoland currently; (3) assume that the aircraft will need medical response while on runway (no auto-taxi) so if I was planning on landing in the next half hour or so, go to alternate. (1) and (3) are well covered, but (2) is subtle — /today/, the chance of two aircraft doing an emergency autoland at the same field at the same time is negligible, but it’s still something both I and the system designers need to think about.
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.
Even the hardware is kind of stupid. They push you into basically buying a separate gps device for each and every hobby you do. It would be nice if there was one gps device that could be a bike computer, exercise watch, golf gps, etc etc. Yes, some devices have multisport mode but usually feature locked compared to the more sport specific device, and for no good reason really. I guess that would prevent them from selling you a $600 gps half a dozen times so that is why it isn’t done.
We have auto-pilot, and we have auto-land. Once we have auto-taxi and auto-takeoff, whats left?
Embraer has been working on their auto takeoff system, E2TS, for some time. While improved safety during a critical phase of flight is a goal, airlines are looking at the possibility that it allows increased performance (higher MTOW, shorter runways, less fuel burn.)
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.
Remote piloting for landing an aircraft that size is problematic because you need more sensors on the aircraft plus a reliable, high-bandwidth, low-latency data link. That doesn't really exist in most places. When the military lands something like an MQ-9 Reaper they typically hand off control to a pilot located within line-of-sight right at the airfield. That obviously isn't practical for civilian general aviation.
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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407