I’m not sure how big the difference is on auto-pilot between marinecrafts and aircrafts, so apologies for including both in the question.
It sounds like it makes the ship/plane run itself, without any need for a person to control it, but how could that be the case? These machinaries sound like they should be steered and watched at all times. It sounds dangerous to leave them on an “auto” mode.
Is there an in-depth explaination behind what auto-pilot does? What are its limits? Is it possible to go wrong in some way, and if so, does it have some kind of alarm?
In: Technology
Aviation is my playground so I’ll stick to that explanation: Your assumption is pretty much correct, that’s what it does. It can be as basic as a “wings level” function in small airplanes, which just looks at a gyroscope to make sure the wings are level and tweaks controls to correct if it isn’t, to 3-dimensional path following to prevent pilots on long flights from having to manually hold headings and altitudes and flightplans for long periods of time.
The airplane is absolutely watched at all times, there always must be a pilot in there, but they don’t have to physically sit there constantly and manually maintaining their path. Arguably the computers can handle things with far more precision than a physical pilot could, especially when you start getting into turbulence and the direction/altitude changes are random and unexpected.
The autopilot in a commercial aircraft needs an absolute minimum amount of things to work properly, and if it doesn’t have those, it will disconnect, usually with an alarm to notify the pilots (if not audible, then flashing lights and such). Aircraft are also build so very redundantly — there’s multiple airspeed/altitude sensors, multiple autopilot and flight guidance computers. I’ve been on an aircraft that had an issue with only one computer — but even then it didn’t disconnect the autopilot, it just notified the pilots ‘Hey, left computer failed’ and it automatically switched to the right computer and kept going.
It’s a pretty advanced system, and differs widely on what exactly it does and how it works between Boeing, Airbus, Embraer, etc., there’s certainly more in-depth explanations out there. At the end of the day, it’s just doing what the pilots would — comparing where they are to where they need to be and making corrections to achieve that.
Latest Answers