This is Garman SafeReturn, and this is its first real save. Here's a demo.[1] It's been shipping since about 2020, originally on the Cirrus Vision Jet. There's a lot going on. The system is aware of terrain, weather, and fuel, but not of runway status. So it gives the ground a few minutes to get ready, sending voice emergency messages to ATC. If you watch the flight track, you can see the aircraft circle several times, some distance of the airport, then do a straight-in approach. It sets up for landing, wheels down, flaps down, lands, brakes, and turns of the the engine. It doesn't taxi. Someone from the ground will have to tow or taxi the aircraft off the runway.
It's mostly GPS driven, plus a radar altimeter for landing.
The system can be triggered by a button in the cockpit, a button in the passenger area, and a system that detects the pilot isn't making any inputs for a long period or the aircraft is unstable and the pilot isn't trying to stabilize it. The pilot can take control back, but if they don't, the airplane will be automatically landed.
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!
devil's advocate:
what if you're a Stripe developer? your bugs won't make the news like a plane crash, but preventing someone's life savings from vanishing into the void and the subsequent mental breakdown is also technically heroic. happy holidays to them too?
no.
Absolutely amazing. Well done, Garmin. Imagine getting to go to work everyday to work on something that actually saves lives. Fantastic systems engineering work.
“ 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 You spend most of your time on documentation and develop with outdated tools.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.
Well, I'm glad it's that slow. I can't shake the idea of the horrors it would be to get a glucose pump whose software has been vibe-coded.
What is in this particular case that requires outdated tools? If they are code, certainly you can write them on VS Code or whatever you likes, and only need to compile and load on the original tools, can’t you?
It’s more the library and language side. Typically you are years behind and once a version has proven to be working, the reluctance to upgrade is high. It’s getting really interesting with the rise of package managers and small packages. Validating all of them is a ton of effort. It was easier with larger frameworks
You need tracability from requirements down to lines of code. It's a very painstaking process.
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 :’(
I could be fast and impactful. Just in a negative way. The problem is that I come from the software dev side so I tend to be less interested in the medical side. It’s the same in a lot of safety critical. There is a lot of mundane work to tick the necessary checkboxes. There isn’t much that is interesting from a technological side. Maybe the result is interesting but getting there takes a lot of extremely boring work.
Maybe you should change your line of work. If you're that unhappy about what you do in spite of the fact that what you do is orders of magnitude more important than the next move-fast-and-break-things-advertising-driven-unicorn then that suggests to me that you should let someone else take over who does derive happiness from it and you get yours from a faster paced environment.
Personally, you couldn't pay me enough to do the latter and I'd be more than happy to do the former (but I'm not exactly looking for a job).
Lots of the moving fast stuff is very impactful, just often in a bad way.
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.
it kinda sucks, but with the constraints it's at least understandable. they wanted an extremely lightweight language with a bytecode VM which could be ported to whatever MCUs in 2015, while also strictly limiting the functionality for battery usage reasons (and, uh, product segmentation/limiting third party access).
These days I'd say "sounds like wasm" but I guess 2015 was a bit before that took off.
Sounds like p-code.
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.
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.
That’s just most heart rate monitors. Often it isn’t enough conductivity (add water before activity) or the battery is low
Yeah, have they ever actually used a garmin product? The hardware and the sound effects are excellent. Everything else is barely functional.
Doesn’t autoland count as software??
Even the hardware is kind of stupid. They push you into basically buying a separate gps device for each and every hobby you do. It would be nice if there was one gps device that could be a bike computer, exercise watch, golf gps, etc etc. Yes, some devices have multisport mode but usually feature locked compared to the more sport specific device, and for no good reason really. I guess that would prevent them from selling you a $600 gps half a dozen times so that is why it isn’t done.
You've obviously never used Garmin software. It's always been woeful and lags well behind the rest of the industry.
The one bright side is that when I switched from Apple Watch to Garmin I couldn’t stand the notifications UX. It finally got me to turn off watch notifications and I feel much freer.
I wonder if a human is in the loop. Obviously the software is hardly ever used (a good thing), so you wouldn't need many humans available. If communication is possible, wouldn't you hand control to a pilot on the ground?
I don't know that they could actually fly the plane - is latency too high for landing? - but they could make all the decisions and communicate with air traffic control, other planes, and the passengers.
Without even getting into latency, just consider the fact that you could lose the signal altogether
So then it's handed off to the autopilot and you are no worse off. But as much as possible, I'd much rather have a human pilot in control.
Militaries have been flying UAVs for awhile now, which must have the same challenges.
Remote piloting for landing an aircraft that size is problematic because you need more sensors on the aircraft plus a reliable, high-bandwidth, low-latency data link. That doesn't really exist in most places. When the military lands something like an MQ-9 Reaper they typically hand off control to a pilot located within line-of-sight right at the airfield. That obviously isn't practical for civilian general aviation.
One major difference is if a uav crashes no one dies. But in china there is apparently now a commercial pilotless flying ev taxi service - which is autonomous with a human on the ground in the loop as you are suggesting.
This feels like the evolutionary endpoint of what people casually call “autopilot,” not the traditional aviation sense.
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.
The embedded systems qualified for use in general aviation avionics have very limited hardware resources. They are severely constrained by form factor, power, and cooling. It's amazing that the developers were able to get speech synthesis working so well.
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.
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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
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Please don't fulminate or introduce political flamebait on HN
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.
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.
At an untowered field, saying the airport name at the beginning and end of each transmission is standard phraseology.
In phonetics?q
If anything, the tail number does not matter nearly as much. A plane with auto land presumably already has ADSb out (almost certainly 1090ES), is squawking 7700, and is probably already IFR anyway. As in this situation, the controllers knew well in advance they had an emergency inbound and who it was. At an uncontrolled field, I need something to tag (robotic "bravo-romeo" is plenty) and a relative position. Bonus if it does the math and predicts landing time, which it does.
Frankly, it should know (like I have to) if it's going to auto land at a towered field or uncontrolled, and adjust as necessary to those circumstances.
I’m not sure I agree. Not sure I disagree, either. If I’m another pilot in the air when this occurs, it feels like the most important things for me to know are (1) stay the hell away from the runway, and the announced approach, for a while; (2) only a single aircraft is doing an emergency autoland currently; (3) assume that the aircraft will need medical response while on runway (no auto-taxi) so if I was planning on landing in the next half hour or so, go to alternate. (1) and (3) are well covered, but (2) is subtle — /today/, the chance of two aircraft doing an emergency autoland at the same field at the same time is negligible, but it’s still something both I and the system designers need to think about.
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
Super cool! We live in the future my friends :)
> We live in the future my friends
I second that. Hearing in the VASAviation video (linked by someone else in a nearby thread) the robotic voice announcing what it's doing, while it does a completely autonomous landing in an airport it autonomously decided on, with no possibility of fallback to or help from a human pilot, is one of these moments when we feel like we're living in the future promised by the so many sci-fi stories we've read as children.
We have auto-pilot, and we have auto-land. Once we have auto-taxi and auto-takeoff, whats left?
Embraer has been working on their auto takeoff system, E2TS, for some time. While improved safety during a critical phase of flight is a goal, airlines are looking at the possibility that it allows increased performance (higher MTOW, shorter runways, less fuel burn.)
auto-troubleshoot
Claude "fly this plane"
"You're absolutely right; that runway was decommissioned in 1974 and is now a cornfield. Would you like me to contact emergency medical services and file an accident report with the F.A.A.?"
Auto-radio
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
There's a rumor, that you are propagating. One person, Tandem46, made this claim ... no evidence provided.
We massively discount how much better we make the world every day.
FYI, a King Air is a small general aviation plane, seating up the 13 passengers.
Proudly wearing my Fenix!
Unfortunately there was a plane crash on Thursday of a Cessna Citation 550 that killed former Nascar driver Greg Biffle, his wife, his two kids, and both pilots. Greg Biffle himself was a certificated pilot and helicopter pilot but not flying in the crash. Incredibly sad. Hopefully technology such as this can reduce these tragedies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
There’s probably a lot that match, but sounds like Colgan Air 3407 in 2009 (the last major commercial airline crash in the US before the mid-air collision earlier this year in DC)
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.
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.
did you see the disruption to air traffic? everyone that needed to land had to go into a holding pattern. the plane was communicating to tower and was going to land since it was emergency. it was not observing other traffic, part of landing is knowing the location of other aircrafts to avoid collision. This doesn't seem to have collision detection/avoidance and space coordination with other aircrafts and entering holding pattern to delay programming yet. This is a good start.
If they designed it to be used for every landing those issues would be resolved. The rarer you use features like this, the more disruptive they will be.
i assume it has to do with success rate. If a safety system is 99% successful, that’s really good. Not so good if you’re going to use it all time.
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.
We don’t have self driving cars.
I've confirmed with my own 2 eyes cars driving on the road without humans in them. I've also rode in a Waymo which had no driver. They definitely exist. Teslas also have self driving.
These people are basically Moon-landing deniers. They crop up a lot these days, sadly. I wish they'd crop up somewhere else.
If they didn't have to coexist with human drivers, we damned sure would.
We have a couple of nuclear-powered self-driving cars on Mars.