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:
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.
I have a Garmin "smart" watch (with every app notification etc disabled) and I love the fact that I can do almost two weeks of exercises (ride, walk, gym) without needing to charge it. The bike computers are also solid. But sadly the UX of the software on these leaves a bunch to be desired, and I've been bitten by many software and firmware bugs in the last years... Including months for which HRM would randomly and persistently drop it's value from say whatever the real value (say 145 for argument sake) to 80.
Absolutely amazing. Well done, Garmin. Imagine getting to go to work everyday to work on something that actually saves lives. Fantastic systems engineering work.
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.
And also — sadly — Monkey C. I cannot imagine what possessed them to invent their own scripting language for wearable device apps. It's sort of like JavaScript but worse and with minimal third-party tooling support.
“ Imagine getting to go to work everyday to work on something that actually saves lives.”
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 You spend most of your time on documentation and develop with outdated tools.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.
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 :’(
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.
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."
>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.
It would be nice to hear something more like:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
What does the AF 449 crash have to do with the existence of a button to return the aircraft to wings level + zero vertical speed?
To answer your question though, LVL has been around for close to two decades now. IIRC there was a Cirrus/Garmin partnership that added it to the latter's G1000/GFC 700 and it's since trickled out to other consumer-grade autopilots.
The AF 449 was in a stall, and the pilots panicked and did exactly the wrong thing. The pilot came out of the lavatory and immediately realized what was wrong, and pushed the stick forward. But it was too late.
If the captain could figure it out, so could the computer.
I recall another crash, not so long ago, of a commuter plane where the wings iced up a bit and the airplane stalled. The crew kept trying to pull the nose up, all the way to the ground. They could have recovered if they pushed the stick forward - failing basic stall recovery training.
There are many others - I've watched every episode of Aviation Disasters. Crew getting spatially disoriented is a common cause of crashes.
IIRC, they were dealing with frozen pitot tubes or other sensors that were keeping the air data computing hardware from getting valid input. An automated "Get me out of trouble" button might have had the opposite effect.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the captain figured out what was wrong immediately, but he was too late.
BTW, my dad taught instrument flying in the AF. He said it was simple - look at the instruments. Bring the wings level, then the pitch level. Although simple, your body screams at you that it's wrong.
He carried with him a steel pipe, so he could beat a student unconscious who panicked and would not let go of the controls. This was against regulation, but he wasn't going to let a student pilot kill him.
When JFKjr's crash was on the evening news, he said two words - "spacial disorientation". Months later, that was the official cause.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
There is simply no way to retrofit a parachute into an existing airframe. The airframe has to be designed around it from the start with appropriate stress points.
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.
To always auto land it needs to be as good as a fully trained and competent pilot, a much higher standard.
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 fly the airplane. Any of a dozen other reasons.
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:
https://vansairforce.net/threads/garmin-emergency-autoland-i...
And also didn't know how to work thr radio? Surely autoland doesn't disable communication
seems like an unlikely rumor to be true at this time
Found the recording with VASAviation subtitles and timeskips (because I couldn't decipher it without!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Nl3LOZNjc
If you're one of the many developers at Garmin who worked on this, I can't imagine a better Christmas gift!
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.
The hardware side is routinely impressive. The software and business sides leave a lot to be desired.
Cane to say the same.
I have a Garmin "smart" watch (with every app notification etc disabled) and I love the fact that I can do almost two weeks of exercises (ride, walk, gym) without needing to charge it. The bike computers are also solid. But sadly the UX of the software on these leaves a bunch to be desired, and I've been bitten by many software and firmware bugs in the last years... Including months for which HRM would randomly and persistently drop it's value from say whatever the real value (say 145 for argument sake) to 80.
Absolutely amazing. Well done, Garmin. Imagine getting to go to work everyday to work on something that actually saves lives. Fantastic systems engineering work.
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.
I am indeed impressed but not at all surprised considering what we used to get to the moon!
Seems like Java is popular at Garmin.
And also — sadly — Monkey C. I cannot imagine what possessed them to invent their own scripting language for wearable device apps. It's sort of like JavaScript but worse and with minimal third-party tooling support.
https://developer.garmin.com/connect-iq/monkey-c/
While I might not trust C code more than Java in life saving equipment, I would trust a median C developer over a Java one.
“ Imagine getting to go to work everyday to work on something that actually saves lives.”
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.
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 :’(
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.
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."
>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.
It would be nice to hear something more like:
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.
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.
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.
That's amazing.
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.
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 - https://youtu.be/K3Nl3LOZNjc
This feels like the evolutionary endpoint of what people casually call “autopilot,” not the traditional aviation sense.
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.
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.
True. Especially after Obama lowered standards and they started hiring literal idiots to boost DEI numbers at ATCs around the country.
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
There needs to be a button on the console of every airplane which is "return the airplane to straight and level".
All modern autopilot systems I've flown have have a LVL (or equivalent) button.
When did that happen? I recall the Air France crash over the Atlantic where the pilots got disoriented. And many others, like JFKjr's crash.
What does the AF 449 crash have to do with the existence of a button to return the aircraft to wings level + zero vertical speed?
To answer your question though, LVL has been around for close to two decades now. IIRC there was a Cirrus/Garmin partnership that added it to the latter's G1000/GFC 700 and it's since trickled out to other consumer-grade autopilots.
The AF 449 was in a stall, and the pilots panicked and did exactly the wrong thing. The pilot came out of the lavatory and immediately realized what was wrong, and pushed the stick forward. But it was too late.
If the captain could figure it out, so could the computer.
I recall another crash, not so long ago, of a commuter plane where the wings iced up a bit and the airplane stalled. The crew kept trying to pull the nose up, all the way to the ground. They could have recovered if they pushed the stick forward - failing basic stall recovery training.
There are many others - I've watched every episode of Aviation Disasters. Crew getting spatially disoriented is a common cause of crashes.
IIRC, they were dealing with frozen pitot tubes or other sensors that were keeping the air data computing hardware from getting valid input. An automated "Get me out of trouble" button might have had the opposite effect.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the captain figured out what was wrong immediately, but he was too late.
BTW, my dad taught instrument flying in the AF. He said it was simple - look at the instruments. Bring the wings level, then the pitch level. Although simple, your body screams at you that it's wrong.
He carried with him a steel pipe, so he could beat a student unconscious who panicked and would not let go of the controls. This was against regulation, but he wasn't going to let a student pilot kill him.
When JFKjr's crash was on the evening news, he said two words - "spacial disorientation". Months later, that was the official cause.
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.
350mph true cruise airspeed for the stock aircraft, so I suspect you had a bit of a tailwind there.
I bet on km/h vs mph mistake.
Super cool! We live in the future my friends :)
If only Biffle was in a King Air.
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.
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.
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.
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]
[0] https://avbrief.com/faa-wants-to-phase-out-ders
There is simply no way to retrofit a parachute into an existing airframe. The airframe has to be designed around it from the start with appropriate stress points.
Why doesn't it always autoland? We already have self driving cars, so a self flying plane seems imminent.
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.
To always auto land it needs to be as good as a fully trained and competent pilot, a much higher standard.
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 fly the airplane. Any of a dozen other reasons.