PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Decision to axe Harrier is "bonkers".
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Old 31st Oct 2010, 18:29
  #79 (permalink)  
LowObservable
 
Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: Far West Wessex
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Aim - Fully auto landings are, I agree, a stretch. However, they don't involve anything on the airplane that isn't already there, and without which the pointy end would not continue to stay in front. The jet is being controlled by computers which do their best to provide the flightpath that the pink squishy thing in the cockpit says that it wants.

The carrier end of the system is pretty simple - GPS receivers located several hundred feet apart and using that differential signal to compute exact positions - and can be made highly redundant.

At a certain point the risk of an accident due to an autoland failure will be less than the known rate of accidents and incidents in carrier landing training.
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