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Posted by bradleybuda 12/21/2025

Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe(avbrief.com)
283 points | 185 commentspage 3
charcircuit 12/22/2025|
Why doesn't it always autoland? We already have self driving cars, so a self flying plane seems imminent.
scottbez1 12/22/2025||
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.

segmondy 12/22/2025|||
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.
charcircuit 12/22/2025||
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.
TylerE 12/22/2025|||
Just draw the rest of the owl. Easy.
charcircuit 12/22/2025||
Easier than self driving at least.
tjohns 12/22/2025|||
That's a really big if, especially since not all traffic has a transponder, and not all airports are towered.

It would need to understand how to visually look for traffic with a camera, and understand what intentions other pilots are communicating on the radio.

TylerE 12/22/2025|||
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.
MBCook 12/22/2025|||
We don’t have self driving cars.
charcircuit 12/22/2025|||
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.
nottorp 12/22/2025|||
Is that self driving in the sense of fully autonomous, or it only works on whatever Waymo/Tesla have mapped to the milimeter?

I've never seen any clear info about that.

charcircuit 12/22/2025||
It's in the sense that there is no human driving the car.
CamperBob2 12/22/2025|||
These people are basically Moon-landing deniers. They crop up a lot these days, sadly. I wish they'd crop up somewhere else.
MBCook 12/22/2025||
I define “self driving car” as level 5. Or at least 4. It should’ve able to drive itself under almost all circumstances. And well.

Tesla isn’t that. Nor Ford. Nor GM. Nor anyone else. Waymo is closest, but they limit the domain and clearly still have issues. Stick a Waymo in snow on rural roads is it good to go? Doubt it.

CamperBob2 12/22/2025||
I define "self driving car" as anything that drives as well as I do.

We won't get into what happens when I drive on a rural road covered with snow and ice... no, really, let's not go there. Moving right along...

CamperBob2 12/22/2025|||
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.

cosmicgadget 12/23/2025|||
You want your plane to still land when there's a citywide power outage.
adrr 12/22/2025||
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.
exabrial 12/21/2025||
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.
cpncrunch 12/22/2025|
350mph true cruise airspeed for the stock aircraft, so I suspect you had a bit of a tailwind there.
lostmsu 12/22/2025||
I bet on km/h vs mph mistake.
BrentOzar 12/22/2025|
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...

lsowen 12/22/2025||
And also didn't know how to work thr radio? Surely autoland doesn't disable communication
ilikehurdles 12/22/2025||
seems like an unlikely rumor to be true at this time
jibal 12/22/2025||
There's a rumor, that you are propagating. One person, Tandem46, made this claim ... no evidence provided.
jibal 12/23/2025||
P.S.

https://avbrief.com/autoland-crew-consciously-let-system-tak...