Big day for Garmin yesterday. They had the first successful use of their autoland system in a retrofitted King Air. That it works is amazing, that it works in an aircraft built decades before the concept was even theorized is what really blows me away.
I’ve only read the first link and not watched the video, so I’m not sure if it was deployed by a passenger hitting the big red button or if it was automatically kicked off by a lack of pilot input. But in either case, it takes over all radio communications, scores all available runways by a number of parameters, and then picks an airport out. It then flies the approach, lands without input, and comes to a stop on the runway. I believe it even shuts the engines down, but I’m not clear on that.
