Sit Back, Nvidia Tegra Can Land Your Plane
The Vertical Power VP-400 Runway Seeker does for planes what the car industry is trying to accomplish for cars: Take the pilot out of the equation and guide you safely to your destination without your interaction.
While there is much more to this device than just hardware, it is rather impressive what an ARM based processor is able to accomplish today. According to Nvidia, the Runway Seeker relies on a Colibri T20 Tegra module for all necessary calculations to take the plane on a path to the nearest airport and land it on a runway.
"As the plane flies, the Tegra calculates a glide path to every runway within range 30 times a second, taking into account factors such as wind speeds, runway lengths, terrain and potential obstacles," Nvidia wrote in a blog post. "For humans to estimate that in the middle of an emergency is very difficult to do, whereas it is relative easy and unemotional for a powerful microprocessor to do,” said Marc Ausman, co-founder of Vertical Power. There are plenty of other scenarios in which such a system could come in handy, especially for those pilots on rely on flying by sight.
Vertical Power said that the device also uses flight simulation software by X-Plane as well as a databases that describe airports, terrain, and any obstacles that could be encountered.

-Obi-Wan Kenobi
You take all of the spacecraft built up to and including the space shuttle and they had less computing power than an old Pentium, yet these things managed to land, navigate space, worked reliably for over 30 years.
If you think I am being overly paranoid. The CEO of Ryanair wants to take not only seat belts out of planes but the seats themselves. The idea is you could herd and fit more people like cattle this way.
What to do in the case of turbulence to avoid injury he gives no suggestions. If a airline company would be willing to put people in that much risk for profits would it not make sense for them to save money by removing the pilot and co-pilot and have a computer that they would not have to pay to do the same job and remove the chance of a worker strike?
You take all of the spacecraft built up to and including the space shuttle and they had less computing power than an old Pentium, yet these things managed to land, navigate space, worked reliably for over 30 years.
I have a shovel that dates from before the Space Age, it still works, go figure!
Any one here watches "Mayday" ?
-Obi-Wan Kenobi
True unless that human doesn't get enough sleep or too much sleep and then thinks the world is ending so why bother land the plane at all.
Well played sir, well played.
Kind a like in auto racing; catching up to the guy in front of you is one thing, now passing him ican be a different matter.
In 25 years of flying I never had a situation where this would have come in handy; simply because that information is already available today in the cockpit; if you did your flight planning as you should have. :-)
And how many seconds did Sully Sullenberger have to spend to figure out where he could go? This app would have told him was and wasn't possible since it would have already calcuated it.
Gravity, lift and momentum was already calculating where he would land for him... in this case, he selected the least of the worst places possible as a runway was impossible to return to.
Jeeze you are the whiner about corporations and CEOs. I highly doubt the FAA would ever approve of that happening, and more importantly and to the point, I highly doubt the general public would approve of that happening. As a private pilot myself, I will never ride in an airplane without humans in control. Now for automated airport train shuttles like Atlanta's airport has for transporting between concourses and baggage/ticketing, that's another thing.
In any event, this tool would never replace the current IFR approach procedures. Flying in the real world is not like flying X Plane or FSX on a PC. But let's not forget there are FAA-approved navigation apps for tablets. Pilots have been using Jeppesen's Mobile FliteDeck on iPads for a couple of years now.
This will NEVER replace a pilot, in fact nothing will ever replace a pilot. It's just an advanced navigation system, you plug it into the airplane and it's an improved auto-pilot. There will still be a pilot sitting right behind the controls watching everything and able to take control should anything overly "bad" happen.
Once it's part of the airplane it then connects to local ATC towers and can coordinate approaches and correct for any irregularities at a faster rate then a human can.
It's a fact of life, computers have faster processing capabilities with faster reaction times then any human could hope to have. Trained humans tend to have better long term pattern recognition and prediction abilities then computers have.