Autoland
Air safety
The recent loss of the Cypriot 737
The investigation is still on and rather than re-assuring the passengers that flying is safe its fare to findings that are fueling rumors and several multi purpose speculations.
I hope that this tragic incident will not remain “smoke in the air”.
With my comment I only wish to drag your attention to direct the industry to implement “already available and not expensive” solutions to recover an airliner with its impaired or incapacitated crew. Any modern aircraft (including the 737 can perform the autoland but need to be assisted by the crew that still has lower the flaps at speed intervals and the landing gear normally 10 NM before the runway threshold.
For a fraction of the cost of a re-newly in flight entertainment system the avionics manufactures could easily develop a software to empowered the air traffic controllers (ATC) to instruct the flight management computer FMC (who give instructions to the autopilot) to be remotely trigged to arm the “Autoland mode” and perform the speed altitude restrictions Flaps setting and gear extension accordingly.
Trough the transponder of the aircraft the FMC could send automatically an emergency code to the ATC alerting that something must be wrong in the cockpit if a cabin pressure or any faulty system alarm is not handled by any human corrective interaction.
Certainly this latest tragic incident (the second if its kind) had darkened years of safety development in automation implementation research toward the possible goal of a total safety.
The technology is there…
Since then is better to remind yourself that at cruise altitude 60 seconds are pretty fast and is therefore better to pay attention to the safety briefing instead browsing the movies list into the in flight magazine.