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Comment by griffinkelly | Hacker News Reader

I've flown airplanes with solid GA plane autopilot that'll fly down to decision height, but you still have to put in flaps, gear, change throttle. To have an airplane do all that on its own is quite impressive, particularly to do a 'nearest' type input on a Garmin then to land it on the appropriate runway, still confuses me sometimes if its a new airport I've never been at.

I'd be interested to know if it declares an emergency, squawks 7700 and controllers are expected to give it a priority and right of way?

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It sets 7700 and broadcasts what's happening, incapacitated pilot is an emergency so that's what it will tell everybody. If there's a controller on frequency it's up to that controller what to do about it, but there's no use arguing with a machine and the pilot is incapacitated, so my expectation is that a controller will keep other traffic out of the way, and if the autoland has picked somewhere with a local tower they'd call that tower and give it heads up it has got an incoming emergency, expect to close the incident runway while they clean up the aftermath.

Regardless, the machine will be broadcasting its intentions and again, there's no arguing with a machine other pilots will just have to accept that it's intending to land and stop on the runway putting it out of use until further notice.

Since the machine can't see lights, I assume it doesn't care whether they are functioning. So in the dark it's likely to land at some small airfield which is actually closed, slightly scary for the passengers to just come to a halt in darkness far from anywhere but arguably safer since nobody else is going to make the error of landing when the runway remains occupied.

> they'd call that tower and give it heads up it has got an incoming emergency

No need:

> [Autoland] would update and broadcast that message every 30 seconds—listening to make sure that it didn’t transmit over any other radio calls. Once near the Class D airspace of the tower, it would have changed one of the radios to the tower frequency and kept the other on the emergency frequency.

Then, once landed, it will brake, and then broadcast that the runway is inop due to airplane on the runway.

Quite amazing.

https://www.aopa.org/News-and-Media/All-News/2020/January/Pi...

Why? Airbus and Boeing and even smaller planes like bombedaire have had this capability. With ads-b requirements on all planes it puts GA aircraft in line with jets (ads-b requires transmitting internal information that autopilot also processes)

What I’m trying to say is that the auto land functionality is not a feat, it’s like self parking cars.. been around for 20 years just now cost efficient and safe enough for the masses to use. In a boeing 787, the pilot still needs to squawk 7777 and they should try comms, don’t know why a GA plane would be different..

Autoland, as used in a capable airliner, is much more limited than this. For an airliner, it's a procedure with lots of configuration and monitoring done by a pilot, in cooperation with air traffic control, which usually concludes with descent on a 3-degree or so path through touchdown and braking. Not to mention things like flaps and landing gear are still usually manually selected.

This is much more impressive, not the least of which because the system itself figures out the best place to land (taking into account operational constraints), how to get there (taking into account weather avoidance), and how to be at the right speed, altitude, configuration, etc. to perform the final approach to landing.

So to use your analogy, getting a bit closer to a self-driving car than just self parking!

> the pilot still needs to squawk 7777 and they should try comms, don’t know why a GA plane would be different..

The system being discussed is for when you no longer have a pilot.

Yes, this is not routine autopilot landing, this is "the pilot just had a massive heart attack and the only other people in the plane are a 12-year-old and an armless nun" landing.

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