Skyryse, the company known for developing automation and simplified control systems for helicopters, said it plans to introduce an emergency autoland system that can be applied to airplanes as well as helicopters.
The new feature which, Skyryse said, will allow aircraft occupants to initiate an automated emergency landing with a finger swipe on a touchscreen, will be part of the El Segundo, California, company’s SkyOS universal aviation operating system. Skyryse said the development represents “a significant advancement in automated flight safety for pilots and passengers – especially for helicopters, where emergency landings are particularly complex and autoland has never been available.”
A New Approach
The planned emergency system is a departure from existing automated landing programs that have been installed in airplanes only and are available in a limited number of models. Because the Skyryse concept integrates emergency autoland into its operating system, it makes the safety feature available to a wide range of aircraft across several categories.
The Skyryse system represents a particularly promising safety improvement for helicopter crews who often encounter high-workload situations involving low-altitude maneuvering, poor visibility and systems failures. Such factors have made development of automated landing technology for helicopters challenging.
“By creating a holistic software-hardware solution like SkyOS, we’re able to develop and integrate lifesaving features like emergency autoland at unprecedented speed,” said Skyryse founder and CEO Mark Groden. “When we started the company, we focused on flight automation in helicopters first because that is the hardest engineering challenge to solve.
Helping Helicopters
“Every other aircraft is a subset of those requirements. Helicopters operate in environments where pilot workload is extremely high, and margins are often razor-thin, and that’s why we’re especially proud to take the 10 years of development and testing we’ve put into SkyOS to date, and continue to add features and capabilities that the aviation industry needs most.”
The company said it expects the SkyOS autoland feature to support use cases such as pilot incapacitation, spatial disorientation, severe weather encounters, and other emergency situations. Development and certification for integration into helicopters will proceed in close coordination with regulators, following certification of Skyryse One.