Piper Announces First GA Aircraft with Autoland Capability

For anyone else wondering what "emergency only autoland" means:

From Wikipedia: "The feature is activated by a guarded red button on Garmin G3000 NX avionics, evaluating winds, weather and fuel reserves to select a suitable diversion airport and taking over the aircraft controls to land, it advises the ATC and displays instructions to occupants."

From the Garmin marketing site [1]: "Garmin Autoland. It takes complete control of the flight to land the airplane in an emergency where the pilot is unable to fly1."

I'm not exactly sure if this is the correct reference for CAT II/III autoland, but seems like the purpose of CAT II/III autoland is to land and aircraft when the pilot would otherwise have a hard time manually landing due to weather conditions (ie. limited visibility) [2]. But if someone has a more accurate description, please correct me!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland#Emergency_autoland

[1] https://www.garmin.com/en-US/autonomi/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system#ILS_...

Edit: Just to clarify the reason for posting this versus just relying on the text in the press release, I was under the impression the announcement was for some fully-automated flight control system (ie. take off and landing without a pilot on board, a la self-driving cars) based on the press release not mentioning why the system would be activated.

Lack of input.

Whether it's a train, a boat or in this case an aeroplane, an aware and capable operator will periodically fiddle with things a little bit, change the heading slightly, tweak engine power a bit, any little change shows you're paying attention still, no need for the machine to intervene. If that doesn't happen for a sustained period, the machine prods them. "Hey are you awake? Let me know you're OK" or moral equivalent. If they still do nothing after a further period, engage emergency systems. On a boat that means summoning the rest of the crew to come see what's wrong on the bridge, on a train it means you just bring the train to a halt and let a remote signaller communicate with anybody else on board, on a plane this system proposes to try landing.

Also a passenger can just (be taught how to) activate it.

CAT II/III can land with limited visibility.

CAT IIIc is interesting because there is no decision height and no runway visual range limitation. Pilots can approach and land completely blind without flying with the stick at all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gthcuZV8agI

Big airports with CAT IIIc can stay open for CAT IIIc available aircraft in all visibility conditions.

Cat II/III use ILS which send out signals on the runway(s) in question. IIRC, those signals need to be monitored to make sure they're with-in certain tolerances because II/III is used in minimal visibility conditions, so there's very little time to correct things at the last minute. It's about trusting a whole bunch of equipment to work properly because you're basically flying with a blind fold on otherwise.

This Garmin G3000-based system primary uses GPS/WAAS (and perhaps VORs) to get location data, so accuracy may not be with-in necessary tolerances for day-to-day use, but it's better than nothing for emergencies.

It’s intended for small aircraft where the pilot might be incapacitated or something. Imagine someone having a heart attack mid flight with their kid onboard or something.