I thought the same — I’m skeptical about the claim of inadvertent activation, because you’d expect a conversation between the real pilots and ATC. I guess we’ll find out at some point.
“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”.
Is there in fact a disconnect feature once activated?
Seems to me for the intended audience of scared non-pilots, having any way to inadvertantly disconnect emergency auto-land would be a Very Bad Thing.
IOW:
Oh, I totally agree there shouldn’t be a way to deactivate it once activated, and there probably isn’t one. I just would expect there to be conversation between the real pilots and ATC, were they not incapacitated – if only to reassure ground operations of that fact.
So, I’m leaning toward that rumor being false; in fact, there was pilot incapacitation, and several lives saved. We’ll see.
Maybe? But I still think there needs to be somewhere in the system, maybe not obvious to a passenger, but buried in menus a pilot can get to, for when some dumbass with impulse control problems decides to see what the big red button does.
Besides the big red button activation, there is also a mode where if the system determines the pilot is no longer operating the controls, it will take over. Sort of like the dead man switch in a train engine. I have to think that you ought to be able to override that. What if a sensor fails, or some unforeseen bug pops up that triggers activation? You’re genuinely in that HAL 9000 world if you can’t take control back.
Edit: I actually bothered to do my homework here. The pilot can hit the AP disconnect button to resume manual control and deactivate auto land. Which also leads me to believe the story of the pilot not knowing how to turn off the system is false. I mean, I don’t know shit about anything, but if I wanted to regain control, I would consider turning off the auto pilot.
Thanks. For sure.
I initially agreed with LSLGuy that it would be a bad thing to make it easy to deactivate autoland, lest a passenger do this (perhaps inadvertently, “just trying to help”)…but now I don’t know. Perhaps it will take several more real-world incidents (hopefully without loss of life) to know better the safest way.
I agree. I suspect someone wanted to see if they were getting their money’s worth. Or they were in the back seat having a toss in the hay.
I love it. I haven’t thought about it from that perspective. “Hey buddy, we just dropped megabucks on this new feature. Do you suppose it works? Hold my beer’”
To my way of thinking, anything this complicated has got to have some unexpected failure modes. And if it’s going to break, there has to be a way to turn it off. Even if it’s as simple as just pulling the fuse.
I thought of that. Or just a curious pilot. For a moment, I even thought Garmin might pay someone to do this! But no, I assume this is a big no-no – effectively, lying to ATC and inconveniencing several other flights (note they closed the airport) – and the story would fall apart pretty quickly, when no medical emergency was found.
No, I’m still leaning toward a real medical emergency.
Maybe it’s just me but I thought of someone pushing the button over the Hawaiian Islands and the system tries to land on an active lava flow. You hardly ever see lava on updated map info.
There’s a video of that and it might have been in this thread. But they announced it all in advance. I t would have been halarious if you could hear “Danger Will Robinson” in the background.
It only lands on airports. There aren’t active airports on the outskirts of the current lava flows.
Can you posit an emergency where it aims for an airport it doesn’t know is closed because of [whatever] recent temporary condition? Sure. Giant earthquake yesterday, wreckage of a 747 in the center of the only runway after a crash 20 minutes ago? etc. Can happen. No doubt about it. Human pilots have certainly landed on closed airports, and they can even ask the controller or FSS for NOTAMs. But did not.
But for a system intended to throw a WAG 98% reliable lifeline to people who are 100% fucked, I’d call a 2% failure rate a home run.
What, I can’t fantasize about the 2% that need an off button? How many Tesla people have killed themselves in the backseat because an easily foreseeable/programmable event went astray?
1000% this. I imagine that the engineers have in mind some future enhancement where ATC can say effectively “spin the wheel again” and force the computer to pick a different airport or runway.
Shoot, now that I think about it, presumably a system this advanced is receiving FIS-B broadcasts, and potentially could even act on that information. NOTAM the runways closed and push the update. ForeFlight handles that situation fine, I don’t see how Garmin wouldn’t.
Is the system purely GPS driven or does it look at the runway it’s landing on? Imagine a object on the runway such as a deer, a ramp truck, or another plane. These are things that pilots can see and hopefully avoid. Does it tie into ADS-B?
It’s pure GPS as I understand it from watching a number of deep dives into the tech, including one where they let Jay Leno hit the red button. No visual component. If there’s something on the runway, it will hit it. I believe as part of its logic that decides what airport to go for, it preferentially looks for reasonably large towered airports where there is some hope of aid in clearing the runway, and of course, services on the ground to assist the incapacitated crew.
As @LSLGuy guy said, the small risk of running into something on the ground is preferable to the 100% chance of a fiery impact at a random location.
It does have access to ADS-B in information, that’s part of the larger Garmin avionics package. Whether is does anything with that info is not clear to me.
I was thinking the same thing. Since this system communicates with the tower, they know a plane is coming. If there’s a maintenance crew painting new stipes on the runway, or something like that, the controllers can call them to get out of the way.
That doesn’t take care of every possibility, but it helps.
Does it do anything with current wind conditions as input to know to choose the non-primary runway because winds are out of the S today instead of the W; if it can choose a different part of the triangle then it doesn’t need to worry about crabbing the landing?
I guess there will even be failure modes, where the system will NOT activate…
e.g. no GPS signal (antenna broken, or GPS-signals jammed/surpressed) … come to mind
(cue in Gary Larson comic: )
- Wife with tall hairdo: Honey, did you pay the GPS subscription for this month?
- Bald guy with terror in his eyes: searching - and finding -his wallet to produce a receipt for payment
- Wwth: GSP!!! the receipt says: GSP!!!
- Mountaingoat on the horizon
ps: of course it has to have a “turn-off” function … in a cramped cockpit with bumpy, dynamic environment - it’s just too easy to elbow-bump it to NOT have a turn-off module.