4 confirmed "saves" since late 2014!!<p>Ignoring the loss of life, according to Wikipedia, the cost of an F-16 is just under $20M. If we consider that two full years, it's earning $40M/year!
There's something extremely gratifying about watching things do what they were designed to do, and do it beautifully.<p>You always hear stories about engineering failures, but it's good to see such a nice success story.
That's pretty amazing, especially considering how fast everything is happening. It has to feel pretty good for the engineers, etc. who worked on this system and see it saving lives like this.
Nominal 5G recover says the article... 9.1 on the pull-up says the HUD!<p>Side bar: favorite F-16 HUD footage: <a href="https://youtu.be/2uh4yMAx2UA?t=164" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/2uh4yMAx2UA?t=164</a><p>Incredibly chilling.
How would you do system-level testing on this system? Obviously there's going to be a simulator, but would you ever install it in a plane and dive at the ground?
Can you differentiate between an aggressive maneuver that results in loss of consciousness and a similar maneuver followed by a controlled one that looks like flight into terrain but is not ?(e.g. because pilot does aggressive acrobatics). Or two aggressive maneuvers followed by almost level flight but where one of them is with loss of control.<p>I'm interested what would be the cues that can be taken from controllers and plane attitude that can make the software say something in the line of "this guy seems lost, I'd better pay more attention". Of course nose down is one, but what about more subtle ones?
There is a really good discussion of this on the Aviation Week site: <a href="http://aviationweek.com/technology/auto-gcas-saves-unconscious-f-16-pilot-declassified-usaf-footage" rel="nofollow">http://aviationweek.com/technology/auto-gcas-saves-unconscio...</a>
"What would be really useful would be a way for controllers on the ground (not ATCs) or in chase planes to assume control of airliners performing erratically, not responding to calls from ATC, air defense fighters, or their corporate offices. THAT could have averted the Germanwings crash and the 9/11 collisions without the need for highly classified hardware in every airliner."<p>this comment really resonated with me. we have the tech for this right now, we had it 10 years ago too... remote piloting drones is now a completely day-to-day occurance. you could argue we had it down "well enough" in the 80s even<p>someone somewhere should be pushing for this. i'd never thought of it before, but now i've seen this comment i'm wondering why we don't have this sort of thing. especially in light of 9/11...
There is a really good bit of info about this on the Aviation Week site. <a href="http://aviationweek.com/technology/auto-gcas-saves-unconscious-f-16-pilot-declassified-usaf-footage" rel="nofollow">http://aviationweek.com/technology/auto-gcas-saves-unconscio...</a>
<i>In a little less than another 2 sec., as the now frantic instructor makes a third call for the student pilot to pull up, the Auto-GCAS executes a recovery maneuver at 8,760 ft. and 652 kt.<p>The student pilot at this point comes around and pulls back on the stick, momentarily increasing Gs beyond the Auto-GCAS standard recovery level of 5 to 9.1.</i><p>Since he came around "at this point" and seeing he still had few seconds left to zero, we don't know with 100% certainty that AGCAS was truly pilot's only option.