Garmin Autoland

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Colin
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Re: Garmin Autoland

Post by Colin »

The planes they are showing for this are flying in the flight levels. I do not think a Vision Jet spends much time out of range of a towered, plowed, mile-long runway.

One of the videos I watched said that the system is monitoring the pilot during the entire flight and will take over if they are incapacitated. One assumes that, like the Tesla, it would pop up a dialog to see if you were just enjoying the scenery for a few minutes and not available to their G3000-mounted camera.

Yes, there is a chance that when it activated it could fly into another plane. I'm really not sure what will happen in that case. Is that the pilot's fault (they were incapacitated) or Garmin's? But my guess is that they would keep the plane in the flight levels for as long as possible and then fly the arrival (if there is one) and then the precision approach from there. They would be squawking the emergency squawk and will have told ATC that there's an issue and where they are headed.

In the Cirrus world I think there have only been a couple of the freak-out pulls and the ones that I know of that were fatal were not among those. The two fatals I often think of are one of the first (over Reno) where the plane was already beyond the limits of the chute, and one over the Rockies where the plane was dragged over terrain under the chute. There aren't THAT many pulls and when I look at them I mostly see successful saves. You can argue on some of them whether they SHOULD have been pulls, but that's a different kettle and those aren't my fish.
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Colin
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Re: Garmin Autoland

Post by Colin »

I have been pondering how they solve the problem of where to fly, but now that I think about it I bet they are starting with US airports in the lower 48 and will have set boundaries. If you are in THIS box you'll be headed to SFO. If you are in THIS one then you will land VNY. That sort of thing. Probably solve it all the time during the flight. It might even know a few spots where it wouldn't be able to easily do it, and it could let you know, sort of like a RAIM check.
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Re: Garmin Autoland

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Colin, you misread my intent. The freak-outs that were fatal did not involve chute-pulls, or at least not in time. I just see cases where the physically functional but emotionally not would activate autoland rather than pull the chute. Or fly the airplane.

And I wasn't thinking only about a specific airframe, such as a vision jet, but a generic airframe that might in the future be fitted with one of these and not necessarily have the VJ's range.

The choice of airport ideally should have some component in its logic to not bypass closer candidate airports. An incapacitated pilot isn't necessarily dead and could benefit from prompt attention, the lack of which could make the difference.

There's a certain roll of the dice in the plane taking over. You reference "the" precision approach. Many of the big airports have several to choose from. Ideally it would choose one, somehow, that wasn't in direct opposition to the one in use. KPDX has 4 ILS's, for example, and 9 arrivals to choose from. And imagine blasting through LA airspace down into LAX from the East, for example. Do these things have the ability to take direction from ATC?
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Colin
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Re: Garmin Autoland

Post by Colin »

No ability to take direction. Yet. By the time this gets to smaller planes I expect we will have 5G in the cockpit and you could have a remote pilot as your first officer at all times. That would be really helpful.

I think given weather data selecting arrival and approach would not be very difficult. I could probably write that filter myself. Again, I'm thinking of an algorithm but the first iteration could *really* just work with pre-selected conditions. At PDX for calm wind use ILS 28L. As soon as there is a tailwind component for that runway switch to the ILS to 10R. Since it is an emergency plane I assume that ATC would be clearing other planes out of the way.
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Re: Garmin Autoland

Post by Boatguy »

A lot of these questions are answered in Max Trescott's Aviation Newstalk podcast #128.

He has a lot of details from Garmin on the development history, and interviews with various Garmin personnel about how it works.
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