An airplane has, for the first time, automatically landed itself after an in-flight emergency, according to the system’s manufacturer.
Two people emerged unscathed from the Beechcraft Super King Air 200 after it stopped on the runway at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport near Denver, according to video posted by emergency responders.
The twin-engine turboprop landed under the control of Garmin’s Autoland system, which the company says is now installed on about 1,700 airplanes. “This was the first use of Autoland from start-to-finish in an actual emergency,” Garmin said in a statement.
Honestly surprised this is the first time, this isn’t that new of a feature when it comes to airplanes, even in commercial jets it predates chatgpt by years. Thanks to Instrument Landing Systems, which have been around an even longer time, pilots can land using solely the instruments in the cockpit without ever looking out the window. It’s not easy to automate landing and many pilots wouldn’t trust it except as a very last resort but their automation problem does avoid some challenges an pitfalls autonomous cars run into.
Non-emergency autoland like you describe had been around for a long time. But you have to manually pick your flight plan and approach, and at least point the aircraft in the general direction of the flight plan so that the AP will engage and handle the rest.
This is a totally different beast because the emergency autoland picked the route and approach, managed the AFCS and comms, and then did the normal autoland stuff after all that. Garmin’s emergency autoland only came out a few years ago.
Some challenges? It avoids almost all, as the airspace is much less congested and better regulated than the roadspace.