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?<p>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.
Proudly wearing my Fenix!
Found the recording with VASAviation subtitles and timeskips (because I couldn't decipher it without!) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Nl3LOZNjc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Nl3LOZNjc</a>
If you're one of the many developers at Garmin who worked on this, I can't imagine a better Christmas gift!
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.”<p>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 You spend most of your time on documentation and develop with outdated tools.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What is in this particular case that requires outdated tools?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?
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.
Lots of the moving fast stuff is very impactful, just often in a bad way.
You'd be even more impressed if you saw just how little resources they have to use (ram, storage, cpu), or how old of a C standard they have to work with. I have a few friends that work on this.
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:<p><a href="https://vansairforce.net/threads/garmin-emergency-autoland-irl-first-use-reported-all-safe.240041/" rel="nofollow">https://vansairforce.net/threads/garmin-emergency-autoland-i...</a>
There's <i>a</i> rumor, that you are propagating. One person, Tandem46, made this claim ... no evidence provided.
And also didn't know how to work thr radio? Surely autoland doesn't disable communication
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.
It's amazing what this technology can do. I wonder what the interface in the cockpit was like, who activated it and why, how it chose the runway, and other details that will likely come out in the final report if not earlier.<p>I think the radio call could be improved a bit though. It spends sooo much time on the letters and so little on the "emergency" part. It almost runs that sentence together "Emergencyautolandinfourminutesonrunway. three. zero. at. kilo. bravo. juliet. charlie."<p>>Aircraft November 4.7. Niner. Bravo. Romeo. Pilot incapacitation. Six miles southeast of Kilo. Bravo. Juliet. Charlie. Emergency auto land in four minutes on runway three zero right at Kilo. Bravo. Juliet. Charlie.<p>It would be nice to hear something more like:<p>Aircraft November-Four-Seven-Niner-Bravo-Romeo. Mayday mayday mayday, pilot incapacitation. Six miles southeast of the field. Emergency autoland in four minutes on runway three zero right at Bravo-Juliet-Charlie.<p>Still amazing, and successful clear communication ... but it could use some more work :)
The cockpit side is very passenger friendly, it assumes zero aviation knowledge. It's a single button and once pressed the system will show on the screens that it's active, what to expect and where it is going. The passengers just sit and watch, while it tells you via voice and on the screens what's happening. No action required apart from the single button.<p>It uses the navigation database (onboard) and weather data via datalink (ADS-B in the US, satellite in other places) to select an airport/runway. It looks for a long enough runway with a full LPV (GPS) approach available and favorable wind.
Some of the audio replays I heard had silence cut out, but the aircraft transmits every two minutes, for about twenty seconds each. It does share the information I'd want to hear in an uncontrolled environment, but in a busy towered class delta it likely needs to be shortened. They had plenty of advance warning of this aircraft being inbound and cleared the airspace well before it arrived, but if it had happened with less notice critical instructions may have been "stepped on" at a critical time.
The only complaint is it uses phonetics for everything multiple times in each transmission, I'm a radio guy, I would use phonetics once, then otherwise spelled out letters - aka, "whiskey lima foxtrot" and WLF the next time I needed to say it.
This is not how communication is done in aviation. Instead, it’s common to abbreviate to the last three alphanumerics of tail numbers (so “niner alpha bravo” for N789AB) after the first call — but this is conditional on not having a potentially confusing other aircraft on frequency (N129AB), and the system here can’t reasonably know that, so must take the conservative option.
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 it does the math and predicts landing time, which it does.<p>Frankly, it should know (like I have to) if it's going to auto land at a towered field or uncontrolled, and adjust as necessary to those circumstances.
At an untowered field, saying the airport name at the beginning and end of each transmission is standard phraseology.
In aviation you only use phonetics, hams are much less consistent about it so it looks weird from the outside.
Can’t say “the field” in the general case; there are many places in the NAS where the same frequency is used by a few uncontrolled airports that are close together.
I'm pretty sure that every ATC already knows this automated voice and what it means.... in a year or two, after having stories and videos it will become even more well known and then people will say that repeating emergency too much or spending too much time on it is a waste of airtime.
If anything I think it talks slower than the actual pilots around it did - <a href="https://youtu.be/K3Nl3LOZNjc" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/K3Nl3LOZNjc</a>
This feels like the evolutionary endpoint of what people casually call “autopilot,” not the traditional aviation sense.
We have auto-pilot, and we have auto-land. Once we have auto-taxi and auto-takeoff, whats left?
auto-troubleshoot
Auto-radio
We massively discount how much better we make the world every day.
This is a huge milestone, and everyone at Garmin who worked on Autoland should be patting themselves on the back, they saved some lives today and will undoubtedly save more. Amazing technology.
The computer announcing the pilot incapacitation is at 11:50.
The mp3 file is malformed but playable. I get different timestamps for the same audio if I jump around.
Thank you. The time marks in the text were way off.
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.
Then again I understood exactly what it was saying every time, which is more than I can say for some of the other traffic on that recording. I’m not sure synthetic-sounding means bad here.
They probably want to make it sound as clearly robotic as possible so some idiot at ATC doesn’t try to argue with it.
This, if it sounds too human ATC is going to try to help and possibly provide vectors, as they should, but The way the system works, ATC needs to be prioritizing clearing the runway and keeping aircraft away
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Super cool! We live in the future my friends :)
> We live in the future my friends<p>I second that. Hearing in the VASAviation video (linked by someone else in a nearby thread) the robotic voice announcing what it's doing, while it does a completely autonomous landing in an airport it autonomously decided on, with no possibility of fallback to or help from a human pilot, is one of these moments when we feel like we're living in the future promised by the so many sci-fi stories we've read as children.
Unfortunately there was a plane crash on Thursday of a Cessna Citation 550 that killed former Nascar driver Greg Biffle, his wife, his two kids, and both pilots. Greg Biffle himself was a certificated pilot and helicopter pilot but not flying in the crash. Incredibly sad. Hopefully technology such as this can reduce these tragedies.
There needs to be a button on the console of every airplane which is "return the airplane to straight and level".
I've ridden on a King Air a few times. Surprised how fast the thing was, traveling west to east we sustained 600mph ground speed. Also pretty quiet interior given it's powered by turboprops.
If only Biffle was in a King Air.<p>Awesome to see stuff like this. Light sport aircraft have parachutes. Cool to see safety being incorporated into the avionics and not just flying it, but getting her down safely.
This is one of my biggest frustrations with aviation— the certification required to get this done is hugely onerous. The whole basis of certified aircraft is that they may not change, which makes improvements like airframe parachutes, auto land systems, and even terrain awareness, engine monitoring, etc. very costly to obtain. I think there is an argument to be made that there should be a pathway to airframe recertification to allow for innovation and improvement to take place in the aviation industry.<p>Instead, the FAA is probably going backwards on this issue and doubling down on the regulatory framework that gave us the MAX-8 situation while narrowing any avenue for smaller firms to innovate [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://avbrief.com/faa-wants-to-phase-out-ders" rel="nofollow">https://avbrief.com/faa-wants-to-phase-out-ders</a>
It's not clear what caused the crash of the private jet carrying Greg Biffle and family. The Garmin Autoland system is designed to address pilot incapacitation, not mechanical failures or active pilot errors.
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.
Very different standards - in its current form of emergency autoland it just needs to be proven to result in equal or better outcomes as a plane with no rated pilot onboard; the best case is another person that knows how to use the radio and can listen to instructions but the more likely case is a burning wreckage when the pilot is incapacitated.<p>To <i>always</i> auto land it needs to be as good as a fully trained and competent pilot, a much higher standard.
i assume it has to do with success rate. If a safety system is 99% successful, that’s really good. Not so good if you’re going to use it all time.
Because it requires specific equipment that many airports do not have, for one. It also doesn't understand things like noise abatement procedures. It has to be setup properly. You don't want pilots forgetting how to <i>fly the airplane</i>. Any of a dozen other reasons.
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. Tesla also have self driving.
If they didn't have to coexist with human drivers, we damned sure would.<p>We have a couple of nuclear-powered self-driving cars on <i>Mars</i>.