And also didn't know how to work thr radio? Surely autoland doesn't disable communication

auto-troubleshoot

The hardware side is routinely impressive. The software and business sides leave a lot to be desired.

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.

“ 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 You spend most of your time on documentation and develop with outdated tools.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.

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.

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

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.

All modern autopilot systems I've flown have have a LVL (or equivalent) button.

350mph true cruise airspeed for the stock aircraft, so I suspect you had a bit of a tailwind there.

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

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.

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.

We don’t have self driving cars.

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.