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Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

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Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#131

Post by AmbroseBierce »

wkat4242 wrote: post #128
shrubble wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Famously the golfer Payne Stewart and the total of 6 people on the LearJet 35, died after a sudden loss of cabin pressure incapacitated everyone including the pilots. A system like this, would have detected it and possibly saved them. I wouldn't expect a whole lot more detail, as that airport is often used by defense contractors like Ball Aerospace, who have a large office nearby.

SafeReturn doesn't detect that as I understand it. It still requires manual activation by one of the passengers.

It does:

> Safe Return is an emergency system designed to be deployed by passengers in case of pilot incapacitation. But Safe Return also is programmed to activate itself when it senses the pilot has become unresponsive or succumbed to hypoxia.

Source: https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2025/june/pilot...

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#132

Post by wkat4242 »

AmbroseBierce wrote: post #131
wkat4242 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SafeReturn doesn't detect that as I understand it. It still requires manual activation by one of the passengers.

It does: > Safe Return is an emergency system designed to be deployed by passengers in case of pilot incapacitation. But Safe Return also is programmed to activate itself when it senses the pilot has become unresponsive or succumbed to hypoxia. Source: https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2025/june/pilot...

Ah ok I was not aware of that. I have not flown a plane that had it (I did fly some with G1000 and autopilot but it didn't have this, I think it's only an option on the G3000). But I just saw about the activation button.

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#133

Post by TylerE »

charcircuit wrote: post #104
segmondy wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just draw the rest of the owl. Easy.

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#134

Post by iamacyborg »

mtanski wrote: post #56
ultrarunner wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Including months for which HRM would randomly and persistently drop it's value from say whatever the real value (say 145 for argument sake) to 80.

It’s annoying but a proper HR strap fixes all the issues associated with wrist based optical readers.

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#135

Post by iamacyborg »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #107
ultrarunner wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sel…

You’re basically describing the Fenix/Enduro lines, albeit the screen will be a bit small to use as a proper bike computer

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#136

Post by charcircuit »

TylerE wrote: post #133
charcircuit wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just draw the rest of the owl. Easy.

Easier than self driving at least.

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#137

Post by dingaling »

silisili wrote: post #130
Animats wrote: post #96

This 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 time…

This is fascinating. My uncle was a pilot, and I asked him 15 years or so ago about the job. He was going on and on about computers and autopilot, claiming that pilots were only really needed anymore for takeoffs and landings, and they could sleep during the rest. Probably realizing the liability in what he said, he was quick to clarify that he didn't, of course. In that short time span we now have a system that can…

Even take-off doesn't really need a pilot; the production Lockheed TriStar airliner had full automation and on at least one occasion ( 25 May 1972 ) flew entirely from runway to runway, across the USA, without pilot intervention.

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#138

Post by jonp888 »

sinuhe69 wrote: post #60
vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #36

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?

Sometimes it's because you need to support ancient esoteric hardware that's not supported by any other tools, or because you've built so much of your own tooling around a particular tool that it resembles application platform in it's own right.

Other times it's just because there are lots of other teams involved in validation, architecture, requirements and document management and for everyone except the developers, changing anything about your process is extra work for no benefit.

At one time I worked on a project with two compiler suites, two build systems, two source control systems and two CI systems all operating in parallel. In each case there was "officially approved safe system" and the "system we can actually get something done with".

We eventually got rid of the duplicate source control, but only because the central IT who hosted it declared it EOL and thus the non-development were forced, kicking and screaming to accept the the system the developers had been using unofficially for years.

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#139

Post by prmoustache »

WalterBright wrote: post #35
ryandrake wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

they were disoriented because a sensor was frozen or something like that and the readings were not correct if I remember correctly, an automatic system would have received the same wrong information.

Re: Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe

#140

Post by IshKebab »

nradov wrote: post #70
IshKebab wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The embedded systems qualified for use in general aviation avionics have very limited hardware resources. They are severely constrained by form factor, power, and cooling. It's amazing that the developers were able to get speech synthesis working so well.

I could do better than this with pre-recorded samples for each word. Especially for the phonetic alphabet.

Also avionics aren't that underpowered these days. They have full touchscreen displays and multicore CPUs.

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