I mean that if your GPS sees you're aiming at the wrong runway, why can't it alert the pilot (and/or tower) that it's going to miss.
If you read the Guardian article from planetjones' comment:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/aug/03/air-canada-...
Quoting:
The investigators said that as the Air Canada jet approached the taxiway just before midnight after a flight from Toronto, it was so far off course that it did not appear on a radar system used to prevent runway collisions.
The next paragraph states they are working on improving that.
> The first landing of a scheduled U.S. passenger airliner using ILS was on January 26, 1938, when a Pennsylvania Central Airlines Boeing 247D flew from Washington, D.C., to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and landed in a snowstorm using only the Instrument Landing System
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system
Presumably they must have done a visual approach or something, because their ILS would have been outright incapable of directing them down the taxiway, as it's for obvious reasons not equipped for ILS approaches.
The signals are transmitted from the ground and used for guidance by the aircraft. No part of ILS could alert ATC to anything since the ground stations are only transmitters.
I don't suppose I would call such stress "undue", since every commercial flight ideally ends with a landing. But the probability of helmet fire is directly proportional to the degree of cockpit stress, and the ILS alignment indicators are very easy to overlook. I suspect the user interface could be improved, but I'm not nearly familiar enough with the subject domain to imagine how.
Actually they can autoland but not everywhere and then you still need to tell them where, basically tune them in on the right glide path. Then you really need to be prepared to take over any second, which is a dangerous position on its own. (Just like all self driving cars right now.)
It's still possible to select the wrong ILS beacon or entering the wrong speed or whatever, and something can still show up in front of the plane.
It's just better in low visibility where you otherwise manually have to follow the ILS 'needles'.
Didn't a plane crash there killing some chinese schoolgirls just because the pilots forgot to set the correct speed. Either it was set too low or they set it but did not activate it. And then the monitoring pilot forgot to monitor the speed since the autopilot never fails...
Why can't the ATC or Pilot guide the computers to the right glidepath? And most importantly, if you're not going in that glidepath, you should get a major alarm, with ATC warned (so they can manually tell the pilot to abort).
There are automated warning systems such as ACAS and separation warnings, but I don't think it would be possible to program something that could understand what's going on with all the traffic all the time and just generally warn if it's not looking right...
"Over-reliance on automation and lack of systems understanding by the pilots were cited as major factors contributing to the accident."
They accidentally turned off auto-throttle and took far too long to react to the falling airspeed.
On one hand, a fully automated landing leaves less room for human error (you can still instruct the plane to land in the wrong place), but you're more reliant on things working as they should. If the automated systems fail for any reason, you've got pilots who are less practised at landings needing to take over at a moment's notice
I also suspect that a pilot making a active landing would react quicker to things than shouldn't happen (and thus may not be picked up by an automated system), such as a ground plane being in the wrong place, or some sort of mechanical failure.