Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe
36 comments
·December 21, 2025darylteo
Found the recording with VASAviation subtitles and timeskips (because I couldn't decipher it without!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Nl3LOZNjc
ryandrake
Absolutely amazing. Well done, Garmin. Imagine getting to go to work everyday to work on something that actually saves lives. Fantastic systems engineering work.
vjvjvjvjghv
“ 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 You spend most of your time on documentation and develop with outdated tools.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.
therobots927
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.
ultrarunner
The hardware side is routinely impressive. The software and business sides leave a lot to be desired.
kylehotchkiss
If you're one of the many developers at Garmin who worked on this, I can't imagine a better Christmas gift!
FL410
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.
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aftbit
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 :)
t0mas88
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.
ultrarunner
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.
Aloha
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.
addaon
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.
HNisCIS
In aviation you only use phonetics, hams are much less consistent about it so it looks weird from the outside.
rogerrogerr
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.
johng
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.
crooked-v
If anything I think it talks slower than the actual pilots around it did - https://youtu.be/K3Nl3LOZNjc
WalterBright
There needs to be a button on the console of every airplane which is "return the airplane to straight and level".
ryandrake
All modern autopilot systems I've flown have have a LVL (or equivalent) button.
WalterBright
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.
netsharc
The computer announcing the pilot incapacitation is at 11:50.
mtlynch
The mp3 file is malformed but playable. I get different timestamps for the same audio if I jump around.
nubg
Thank you. The time marks in the text were way off.
IshKebab
Amazing how bad the speech synthesis is for something so safety critical.
alwa
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.
ls612
They probably want to make it sound as clearly robotic as possible so some idiot at ATC doesn’t try to argue with it.
HNisCIS
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
reactordev
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.
ultrarunner
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]
ajju
Super cool! We live in the future my friends :)
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...