A demonstration of the first autoland system fitted to the De Havilland DH121 Trident in the early 1960's

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Away_fur_a_skive@reddit

The system was so reliable that the RAF banned it's use for normal operations in the Nimrod as the runways began breaking up because the aircraft were hitting the exact same spot on touchdown each time.

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Go_Loud762@reddit

Sounds like a right proper decision. Instead of improving the runway, ban the use of autoland.

Bureaucracy has no beginning and no ending.

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Hour_Analyst_7765@reddit

Total confidence the system just works to be sitting like that!

And as a 90s kid, I'm quite confused to see pilots talk like this with "live commentary" when many modern airlines have sterile cockpit rules below 10000ft.

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kd_butterballs@reddit

This is in the 60’s though. Aviation safety and procedures have come a long way. I was also pretty surprised by the nonchalance of the pilot talking.

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Go_Loud762@reddit

Also a test flight, which might not be required to adhere to sterile cockpit regulations since that flight was probably flown under (the British equivalent of) Part 91 instead of Part 121.

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oskich@reddit

Before the crash of Braathens Flight 239 in 1972, the pilots had been playing music in the cockpit and had been partying the whole night before. Different times for sure 😅

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Possible_Copy_7526@reddit

Ok let me watch a 1hr YouTube video to better understand your comment

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Specialist_Reality96@reddit

They will have done likely 100's of landing in clear conditions then likely another 100's in crap conditions long before anyone thought of bringing a film crew along.

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NoDoze-@reddit

So nonchalant for a test flight. Working hard to convince the public how good and safe it is.

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Philly514@reddit

Right seat had hands on the yoke and the left pilot had his left eye outside lol

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Hot_Net_4845@reddit

The Trident was ahead of its time. Not only could it land itself, it also had what was effectively a rudimentary GPS. You can see the map on the instrument panel, which, IIRC, used 4 Doppler Radars to show the aircrafts position on a paper map roll. At the end of the video, you can also see the nose gear that had to be offset 3.5m and close sideways to accommodate the large avionics bay

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Twitter_2006@reddit (OP)

Yeah.The Trident and TriStar were both ahead of their time and wish they sold a lot more than they did.

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realNoobnoob@reddit

Why they stopped?

I thought current airlines have autopilot

Hence auto park land?

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TheDrMonocle@reddit

Basically all airliners have autopilot. Not all have autoland. And for the ones that do, you also need appropriate ground equipment in order to do it. A basic ILS won't necessarily give accurate enough guidance to bring you all the way to the runway.

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realNoobnoob@reddit

In 2026 ?

Why do you need ground equipment ?

Laser and satellite 🛰️ positioning are enough and LiDAR too

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TheDrMonocle@reddit

No airplane has lidar. GPS systems are augmented by ground based systems to improve accuracy to a point where you can treat it like an ILS. Im not aware of any that will be accurate and reliable enough to include autoland.

The conditions requiring full autoland are rare enough that maintaining autoland features just isn't cost effective. The same reason why not all cars have FLIR cameras. They can be expensive for the 1% chance theyre useful.

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realNoobnoob@reddit

Yeah but in case if my car I max have 5 passengers but in a plane with 300 passengers that 1% is very very important !

Maximizing efficiency is not an option in commercial airlines

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TheDrMonocle@reddit

Its really not. If the 1% weather is bad enough that they need autoland to make it in, then the safe option is to just land st another airport.

Airlines do their best to be efficient but at some point they also need to do a cost benefit. Is it worth the extra cost of the autoland systems and the extra maintenance, are the airports they use frequently equipped for it? Generally the answer is no. So aircraft haven't been designed with autoland because its just not worth the cost.

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realNoobnoob@reddit

True airline have very tin margins of profit and they are cutting cost very hard but I still can’t get my head around this aerospace and planes in my mind need top notch technology lidar radar compute and so on

So in other words a computer with rtx 5090 ti is more powerful than any commercial airplane which is sad

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TheDrMonocle@reddit

planes in my mind need top notch technology

They dont. They need robust reliable technology. Lidar wouldn't help a plane do anything.

So in other words a computer with rtx 5090 ti is more powerful than any commercial airplane which is sad

Yes and no its not. An airplane doesn't have one single computer. It has dozens performing specific roles, then backups to those systems. A 5090 is more powerful than all of them combined but it's rendering complex 3d images, physics, and whatever else a GPU does as fast as it possibly can. Aircraft computers on the other hand (and this is a gross oversimplification) are just doing math. Computers are extremely good at doing math so they dont need to be super fast. They need to be reliable.

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realNoobnoob@reddit

It hear me out these gpu do super complex ai math vector math actually so it can be multiple computer with rtx 5090 ti each and ai models and run a plane so much efficiently and actually do more crazy unheard of things

What if a plane was fully automated ? Ai based?

What if it could lower the consumption somehow or do some crazy things

Lots of possibilities

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TheDrMonocle@reddit

Its absolutely a possibility technology wise. I'm sure the military is already doing it.

But when you're flying 100-400 humans around you dont want to fuck around. The sky is FAR more complex than you realize. In order for AI to be a thing flying planes around we'd need a system to network all if them together, run complex algorithms to look st potential conflicts with other aircraft, sequence them for landing, and handle aircraft not run by AI. Then you need weather monitoring and ways to work around that. Then you need proven reliability and redundancy. Then you need to gain the publics trust. We're absolutely nowhere near a state where we could let AI do anything more than fly a plane in protected airspace right now. And decades away from any passenger flights. We just dont have the infrastructure yet and AI isn't advanced enough to really make it happen yet.

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realNoobnoob@reddit

So let’s found a startup around this?

Co-founders? 50/50?

Deal?

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TheDrMonocle@reddit

What's 50/50 of $0? Cause that's where we'll end up.

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realNoobnoob@reddit

Well all good idea start as dumb one and impossible that’s why disruptive

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spazturtle@reddit

Most modern aircraft still use the Intel 80286 CPU from 1982 for their flight computer.

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realNoobnoob@reddit

Why?

So you’re saying my pi 4 8GB is 1000x powerful than a plane flight system computing power

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Charlie3PO@reddit

Yep, aircraft computers are typically very weak and slow powered by modern standards. The reason is that they only do really basic functions and conversions, the sort of stuff a basic scientific school calculator could do. A bunch of variables go into a function and it spits out a number. They prioritise stability and reliability over the need for processing power.

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realNoobnoob@reddit

That’s epic!

So what’s stopping them from throwing a bunch of h200 gpu and making this airplane dance in the air and auto land park and speak with the passengers ?

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spazturtle@reddit

Because it is already approved and tested.

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crucible@reddit

The Trident was replaced by the Boeing 757 at British Airways.

This paragraph is from the Wikipedia page for Autoland:

This led to the absurd situation for British Airways that as the launch customer for the Boeing 757 to replace the Trident, the brand-new "advanced" aircraft had inferior all-weather operations capability compared to the fleet being broken up for scrap. An indication of this philosophical divide is the comment from a senior Boeing vice president that he could not understand why British Airways were so concerned about the Category 3 certification, as there were only at that time two or three suitable runways in North America on which it could be fully used. It was pointed out that British Airways had 12 such runways on its domestic network alone, four of them at its main base at Heathrow.

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Professional_Act_820@reddit

The American's said and will continue to say anything necessary to get rid of foreign aerospace competition. Defense or civil. Boeing tried it with the C Series (A220) and lost in the long run. In the 50s they had Canada scrap the CF 105 saying that missiles were the future and there would be no need for interceptors. "We'll defend you" trust us. Things changed this year for Canada... Ukraine has been living that insult for the past 4 years and well before that.

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Messyfingers@reddit

The cf105 was doomed regardless for the same reason every supersonic bomber and subsequently why most every other interceptor got cancelled, ICBMs made them irrelevant.

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Professional_Act_820@reddit

F-104s were instead purchased by the RCAF. The USAF used the F-106 and the F-105D and continue to employ interceptors to this day F-15 and F-22. They made up the narrative to sell more stuff to allies.

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Tin_Pusher1234@reddit

British aviation is and was absolutely amazing. It’s unbelievable we’ve slipped to the point where we are now.

I know we still innovate, but not to the scale we used to.

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Automatic_Mud917@reddit

How did airliners safely land in fog prior to autopilot?

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jcla@reddit

They didn't. Fog meant flying to an alternate airport. The same is still true today if the airport or the aircraft and crew aren't fully equipped and ready for an autoland approach.

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todo_code@reddit

oh wow. i thought they had to do instrument landing and just had very bright lights for the last 40 meters or so

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clackerbag@reddit

The original implementation of the Instrument Landing System (ILS) has been around for a long time, since around the end of WW2 or so. Eve the most basic version of ILS, a Category 1 system, will typically allow an aircraft to descend to 200ft altitude with only 550m of forward visibility required for the approach. This is generally sufficient for all but the worst weather days.

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f1racer328@reddit

You can hand fly a CAT III approach with a HUD. Don’t need auto land.

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Hot_Net_4845@reddit

IIRC Manchester used to have "diversion days" until the 80s where morning fog at Heathrow caused a lot of the inbounds to divert to Manchester, so spotters would flock to the airport to see the exotic aircraft. With the introduction of autoland, they aren't really a thing now

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oskich@reddit

By using the environmentalists favorite system -> FIDO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_Investigation_and_Dispersal_Operation

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willfoxwillfox@reddit

I have a strong feeling but hazy memory that I watched this on a BA longhaul IFE really recently.

I seem to remember there being a good few of these pathé newsreel type films. Do you have a link to this, or any others?

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vanishing_point@reddit

"This thing is so safe, I'm not even going to wear a seat belt."

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NoDoze-@reddit

So, is ILS = Autoland? Crazy to think this was new tech in the 60s. What planes was is adopted across the board? We've come a long way since then too!

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SpiritedInflation835@reddit

Higher ILS categories mean less visibility, both vertically (to the ground) and horizontally.

ILS category I means you're usually hand-flying the approach. This is what you're certified to do when you get an instrument rating as a private pilot.

ILS cat II is rarely hand-flown. It requires a radar altimeter onboard the aircraft.

ILS cat IIIa and IIIb is done automatically (except with those very modern head-up displays)

Funnily, ILS cat IIIc would mean zero visibility. You could *land* an airplane just safely - but to taxi to the terminal, you need the visibility conditions of at least IIIb............

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praetor450@reddit

No exactly. An ILS is an Instrument Landing System, that consists of two separate radio beams to help guide an airplane to the runway. One provides lateral directional guidance (runway alignment) known as the localizer, and the other provides vertical directional guidance, known as the glide slope.

You can either use the autopilot or hand fly it following instruments onboard to keep both sets of needles centered, meaning you are on the correct path. However once you are over the runway the controlling of the aircraft to touchdown and rollout is done by the pilot.

The autoland system is one that will not only will fly the ILS to the runway, but then will control the aircraft to the touchdown on the runway. That very last part is the important one and is basically what the autoland is.

This is the most simple explanation for the system, there’s a few more things I have left out.

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