Most pilots flying today have access to the aircraft parachute.
Didn’t know about that… But it’s quite sobering to see that navigating, flying and landing a lightplane, even avoiding bad weather, is such an easy task that it can be solved by a little programming.
Why do you need auto land if any nervous pilot can land a Boeing 737 safely?
Diamond specialises in one-seater and two-seater planes
One learns something new from the www every day! 
But it’s quite sobering to see that navigating, flying and landing a lightplane, even avoiding bad weather, is such an easy task that it can be solved by a little programming.
It is… until something goes wrong and the adaptive properties and creativity in troubleshooting is needed. There is no system that could catch up with a trained pilot in this respect.
The first unmanned DA42 flew autonomous mission profiles (including landing) as early as 2011.
Automatic. Not autonomous. There is a huge difference in flight control and guidance between those two, despite the constant try of some media to blur this differentiation.
An almost completely pointless innovation from a safety point of view, if interesting and fun to build for an engineer…
Remind me – what percentage of fatal accidents are caused by pilot incapacitation?
Envelope protection is a lot more useful, terrain warning and -aviodance as well. For these two I would pay…
Shorrick_Mk2 wrote:
This is not new. The first unmanned DA42 flew autonomous mission
Yes. Diamond is after the military market for unmanned flight and has had this in a prototype for three years or so.
The system is basically a GPS guided fly-by-wire in a GA plane which would make it too expensive to equip as a safety feature for the GA niche Diamond’s planes are built to fill. Still, if costs can be reduced over time much of this kind of tech would be welcome in GA by those who welcome things like the BRS chute.
I think it is a great idea. Innovation is at the heart of GA. These things will in time become standard and if nothing else will provide a degree of passenger comfort and resistance to single pilot ops.
I believe that flying will be automatized. It’s for emergency use today, but if in 20 years Ryanair can get rid of pilots, they will not hesitate.
Lifts also had operators at some point.
Loco – I think that’s actually the savior of GA. Automation. Once flight becomes mostly automatic and a PPL is no harder or more expensive to do than a driver’s license, we’ll see huge growth in aviation. It is inevitable that the long term future for human transportation is in individual aircraft, just like cars are today. Airlines won’t exist in 100 years.
