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
Well, first off, yes to all of your concerns. Autopilot does need to be constantly monitored. As far as an alarm if it goes wrong, that’s very airplane dependent. The plane I fly for work will trip an alarm if it gets more than 200 feet off my assigned altitude, but if for whatever reason I’m on the wrong ground track I would never know unless I’m paying attention. Autopilots work by tapping into your avionics system to pull things like altitude, attitude, and heading and then use a series of servos attached to your flight control surfaces, or just manipulate a fly by wire system, to make the surface move until those feedbacks from the avionics are what the pilot set.
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