Autoland
Can airplanes land themselves?
Yes…ish. Some of them can under some circumstances.
“Autoland” is a feature on some larger airlines. But it has limits:
It has to be enabled and initiated. It doesn’t just do it automatically.
The airport has to be equipped for it. The plane doesn’t really “land itself” – the plane and the airport land it together.
The pilot is supposed to actively prepare and monitor the plane while this happens. In fact, some pilots said the preparation and monitoring to autoland is more work than just landing the plane themselves.
My research indicated that it is used, but only rarely – mainly when the visibility is so low that the pilot can’t see anything, so the only way to land is via instruments.
Why I Looked It Up
The pilot episode of Fringe had a flight on which some very bad things happened to everyone (it involved skin melting – it was pretty graphic). The plane supposedly landed itself in Boston.
I was curious if this was a real thing, or if they just make it up for the plot, since they had to get the plane on the ground in one piece for the team to investigate it.
While technically possible, the unrealistic thing in Fringe is that the bad things happened during the middle of the flight, and it seems that the plane just continued on by itself and landed. That doesn’t match what I’ve been reading. My research indicates that autoland is actively initiated very late in a plane’s flight (like, right before final approach), rather than the plane just thinking, “Well, there’s the airport…I guess I better land myself.”
Postscript
Added on
In an article about an upcoming automatic takeoff system, I found this:
In late 1965, at what’s now London Heathrow airport, a commercial flight coming from Paris made history by being the first to land automatically.
The plane – A Trident 1C operated by BEA, which would later become British Airways – was equipped with a newly developed extension of the autopilot (a system to help guide the plane’s path without manual control) known as “autoland.”
Today, automatic landing systems are installed on most commercial aircraft and improve the safety of landings in difficult weather or poor visibility.