code to perform landing on autopilot possible?

Maybe... Flight simulators do it all the time.

I imagine that the number of actual crashes due to a pilot that was unavailable compared to the overall crashes is pretty insignificant. (although its much larger for smaller planes/solo pilots) Its not really in the interest of the airlines to do such a think because chances are it won't save that many lifes(and hence that much money). It might be fessible for smaller planes but I doubt there is any real demand for it. Someone would not only have to develop the system but also scout hundreds of thousands of locations and somehow get permission to use them. Also there might be legal reasons why someone wouldn't want to develop such a system. If the autopilot plows into a group of small children then who's going to get blamed?

Modern passenger aircraft routinely land on auto-pilot; that's the easy part.

Having it select a nearby airport and a suitable approach route is somewhat harder. For a start, it isn't going to be able navigate around other air traffic, so the system would need to be able to integrate with ATC, and you would need to ensure that it only activated in airspace under such control.

It would also need up-to-date information on (non-)availability of specific airports, e.g. due to maintenance, weather conditions, etc.

I think that, realistically, such a system would need to be designed to be activated manually, e.g. via a control transmission from ATC giving it a new flight plan. You would need strong authentication mechanisms so that a terrorist can't tell it to land on an obstructed runway, fly into a restricted area with a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy, etc.

Did you ever do a landing ? The tower tells you which track, perhaps it is the 09, perhaps the 27, depending on local winds. When the track(s) are busy, the tower tells you to stand by at Echo at 2500 feet, the tower also warns you about an approaching aircraft from the west at possibly

2000 feet. On the same airport, there also are gliding planes operating. Watch them too. These guys are allowed to radio in the local language, and they gladly do that. The gliders have the right of way, by the way. They cannot start through, nor take another round.

An automatic approach would be challenging, and possibly be successful if all involved were cooperating. In case of an accident, the insurances are known not to be cooperating.

Rene

Autopilots in large planes are capable of taking off, flying to the destination, and landing without any user (pilot) intervention.

Issues involved include

1. People don't trust 'em
2. They can't handle all conditions
3. They have problems with changes
4. People don't trust 'em

How would the autopilot know it was needed? Saying cabin depressurization doesn't always mean the pilot is unable to fly. If the auto-pilot was off, who would turn it on? If the auto-pilot was on, how would it know there was a problem?

The aircraft of the future will have three entities on the flight deck. A computer to fly the airplane, a pilot to fly the airplane in the event of the apparent malfunction of the computer, and a dog to bite the pilot if (s)he attempts to fly the airplane.

Having said that, it would be relatively trivial to design such a system, but to get everybody on board for the one-off instance of that one lone incapacitation in the last googol of years isn't going to happen.

Jim

-- "If you think you can, or think you can't, you're right." --Henry Ford

One option would be a "dead man's handle", where the pilot has to respond to occasional prompts, similar to a watchdog timer. Of course, the lack of a response might mean that that the system which detects that the pilot is still alive has simply stopped working.

Given that total pilot incapacitation is quite rare, it's doubtful that you could come up with a system which prevents more accidents than it causes.

With the latest GPS gear, an uplink from ATC and suitable remote command and control protocols, this could be done.

Problem: I was reading a while back where the Department of Defense considers the outsourcing of avionics s/w development to third world countries to be a major stumbling block in the development of robotic battlefield systems. They are trying to figure out how to keep back doors out of code that will be used for controlling autonomous weapons systems. Imagine the havoc if some teenage hacker d00dz with a laptop crack the system and get control of a missile equipped robot helicopter. Or al Qaida.

This is the Department of Defense. If they are going to have trouble ensuring clean and secure software, can you imagine how bad it must be for commercial vendors? Back when I worked for Boeing, we couldn't prevent the guys responsible for uploading avionics s/w to aircraft from using the same (Windows) laptops for surfing suspect web sites (unauthorized Pamela Anderson wallpaper on ATE equipment was one example of this).

--
Paul Hovnanian     mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com
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Have gnu, will travel.

You had pretty poor IT guys, then -- you can lock down any modern Windows machine to be *very* tight, only letting specific applications run and nothing else, etc. You can also enable auditing such that it's clear if anyone's been trying to tinker around with the configuration and react accordingly.

Often this sort of problem is indicative of no one communicating that there really are important reasons not to "mess with" the ATE boxes and getting employees to buy into that. It helps if they have their own "regular" PCs where you do let them mess around and customize things, including downloading Pamela Anderson wallpaper if they feel like it.

We had Microsoft people come in and try. Perhaps they should hire the mechanic that they caught* reinstalling it after they came in and locked Windows 2000 down.

That'll never happen. That's why an OS needs security. The above bozo was just goofing around, but if you depend upon goodwill, you'll never prevent malicious attacks. (Memo to Osama bin Laden: It is against company policy to tamper with critical avionics software. Your compliance is kindly requested.)

*This guy wasn't too bright. The ATE equipment in question is a big rack mounted unit sitting in the middle of the shop floor. The monitor is sitting at eye level standing up (All right, no 'short' jokes!). Eventually, someone spotted what he was doing from 50 or 100 feet away, called management and had his ass canned.

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Paul Hovnanian     mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com
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"Yee-Ha!" is not an adequate foreign policy.

"Microsoft people" come in all ranges of skill levels? :-)

Somewhere there's a registry key that points to the wallpaper that the desktop loads. If that key's permissions are changes so that only, e.g., Admins can write to it (or even read it!), I think you'd be set. I do acknowledge that Microsoft often makes this thing harder than it should be, though -- they have a "prevent changing wallpaper" key in the registry that isn't always respected, for instance!

Or was the problem that your ATE box had crappy software that required admin rights to operate? :-(

I'm a little unclear on how this could have happened. Most PC BIOS let you limit booting to the hard drive and then allow you to password protect the BIOS from changes. Been there, done that years ago at a McDonald/Douglas plant.

Never flown an aircraft, actually.

In an emergency, the onboard computer could send a message to the nearest airport, requesting permission to land; if no response came from that airport, or if permission were denied, the computer would send a message to the next closest airport, continuing the process until the computer decides that a field landing would be wisest before fuel runs out.

Granted, the plane would probably need to know the local geology, so that it doesn't plow into a mountain while trying to land.

If permission were granted, the airport would pretty much have to close the runways to all other traffic, while the plane tried to land. (Unless the firmware were really sophisticated, and could play nicely with other pilots.)

Alternatively, if the onboard computer decided pilots were incapacitated (no one responds to a voice warning for 15 minutes, for instance) the computer could request the nearest control tower to "land" the plane wirelessly via joystick. This would require the necessary hardware be installed at each tower, though.

Michael

nothing

been

You can't stop people from hacking Windows. From what I've been told, acquiring root privileges is pretty simple. I don't know personally. I wouldn't allow Windows on my property.

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Paul Hovnanian     mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com
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Telemark:  If it was easy, they\'d call it snowboarding.

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com posted to sci.electronics.design:

The fundamental technology is not so much the issue, the US Navy had carrier controlled landing in the early 1970's. While it worked, only pilots commanded to use it would. It tended to be rather scary for anyone conscious on-board.

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com posted to sci.electronics.design:

As initiated by another the range of available runway length, air traffic control think LAX and Hawthorne Municipal airport which is within the LAX control envelope. Think about no tower VFR fields, competing traffic (sometimes unpowered) and very local geography. A truly general solution that is acceptable may be very difficult.

There usually would not be any joysticks at each local tower, air traffic controllers may not be pilots. The computers would have to handle that, and the required databases would be immense.

RST Engineering (jw) snipped-for-privacy@rstengineering.com posted to sci.electronics.design:

Very funny. Too bad you have not been reading the stuff i usually get about various aircraft crashes that i get. You could not have made that joke then.

And absolutely nothing can go wrong, go wrong, go wrong...

Wow. Did it engage if a pilot blacked out from pulling too many Gs?

Is this feature still available in modern fighter aircraft?

The issue isn't that such a system would never come in useful. The issue is that the number of cases is too small to be worth either the additional cost or the risks introduced by the additional complexity.

Paul Hovnanian P.E. snipped-for-privacy@hovnanian.com posted to sci.electronics.design:

Yes, if Sony had no problem installing root kits on millions of PC's it can't be very hard. Admitted, they were probably not protected worth a tinkers damn though.