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Comment by shrubble | Hacker News Reader

Famously the golfer Payne Stewart and the total of 6 people on the LearJet 35, died after a sudden loss of cabin pressure incapacitated everyone including the pilots. A system like this, would have detected it and possibly saved them.

I wouldn't expect a whole lot more detail, as that airport is often used by defense contractors like Ball Aerospace, who have a large office nearby.

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There's a bit more detail today.[1] Air taxi service, plane flying with two pilots, no pax, loss of cabin pressurization, system activated automatically, crew decided to let it finish its job.[2]

[1] https://avweb.com/aviation-news/garmin-autoland-activation-c...

[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/plane-emergency-landin...

[3] https://www.buffaloriveraviation.com/

Even without autoland, I've never understood why there wasn't an emergency system to handle depressurization events when it detects no pilot input. There have been enough ghost flights, even in the last 20 years, that such a system could've saved hundreds of lives. (Helios Air 552) Automatically dropping altitude, or even just changing the transponder to some automatic value, would help.

I guess in some cases lowering altitude could result in flight into terrain or possibly entering airspace where collision with other aircraft would be more likely ?

Not these days, with detailed terrain maps and GPS + GPWS.

The chances of colliding with anything else would be tiny. In case of other commercial jets zero, thanks to TCAS at the least.

GPWS = ground proximity warning system

TCAS = traffic alert and collision avoidance system

Some planes have this, but planes are expensive and last a long time, so a lot of them don't.

SafeReturn doesn't detect that as I understand it. It still requires manual activation by one of the passengers.

It does:

> Safe Return is an emergency system designed to be deployed by passengers in case of pilot incapacitation. But Safe Return also is programmed to activate itself when it senses the pilot has become unresponsive or succumbed to hypoxia.

Source: https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2025/june/pilot...

Ah ok I was not aware of that. I have not flown a plane that had it (I did fly some with G1000 and autopilot but it didn't have this, I think it's only an option on the G3000). But I just saw about the activation button.

It says somewhere that the system also detects if the aircraft is unstable and the pilot has not attempted to stabilise it, or if there's no input for a long time.

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