A team of German researchers has created an automatic landing system for small aircraft that lets them touch down not only without a pilot, but without any of the tech on the ground that lets other planes do it. It could open up a new era of autonomous flight — and make ordinary landings safer, to boot.
Now it would be natural to think that with the sophisticated autopilot systems that we have today, a plane could land itself quite easily. And that’s kind of true — but the autoland systems on full-size aircraft aren’t really autonomous. They rely on a set of radio signals emitted by stations only found at major airports: the Instrument Landing System, or ILS.
These signals tell the plane exactly where the runway is even in poor visibility, but even so, an “automatic” landing is rarely done. Instead, the pilots — as they do elsewhere — use the autopilot system as an assist, in this case to help them locate the runway and descend properly. A plane can land automatically using ILS and other systems, but it’s rare and, even when they do it, it isn’t truly autonomous — it’s more like the airport is flying the plane by wire.
Researchers at Technische Universität München might just make true autonomous landing a practical reality, though. They’ve successfully tested a system that uses a combination of computer vision and GPS to have the aircraft land itself.
The technology uses GPS to navigate, but allies that with both visible light and infrared cameras to spot the runway and obtain an accurate sense of its position even when fog or rain hurts visibility. From there, the aircraft can calculate a glide path and otherwise touch down all on its own.
The project is still young, but it’s promising. A test landing in late May went as well as you could hope. The aircraft recognized the runway from a long distance and landed on the centerline without the pilot once taking control. If it’s refined enough, the system could make hands-free landings feasible at virtually any airfield, not to mention give pilots a backup. This also lays some groundwork for end-to-end autonomous flight that might only require supervision for complete trips.
This is a major milestone in automated flight, since until now planes have had to rely on extensive ground-based systems to perform a landing like this one — which means automated landings aren’t currently possible at smaller airports or should something go wrong with the ILS. A small plane like this one is more likely to be at a small airport with no such system, and should a heavy fog roll in, an autoland system like this might be preferable to a pilot who can’t see in infrared.
Right now the tech is very much still experimental, not even at the level where it could be distributed and tested widely, let alone certified by aviation authorities. But the safety benefits are obvious, and even as a backup or augmentation to the existing, rarely used autoland systems, it would likely be a welcome addition.
