Air Force Software will Take Over Aircraft Flight Controls to Prevent Crashes

Auto-GCAS software will take over flight controls from pilot to prevent controlled flight into ground According to the United States Air Force, the current manual "warning only" collision systems don't prevent many of the controlled-flight-into-terrain accidents. This is partly due to the fact that warning lights or tones don't offer any help if the pilot has lost consciousness or has lost their situational awareness. To help reduce these accidents, the Air Force recently announced that it will begin implementing a new piece of software into some of their advanced fighter jets including the F-16 Fighting Falcon, F-22 Raptor, and the F-35 Lightning II. The new software application is called Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System, or Auto-GCAS. Auto-GCAS takes into account data from a number of factors including the aircraft weight, performance, positional information and digital terrain elevation data to calculate the aircraft's relative position to the earth. It then calculates the maneuvers required to prevent a collision with the ground. Rather than simply telling the pilot what to do to avoid the collision, Auto-GCAS actually takes over control of the aircraft and performs the maneuvers autonomously when the software finds that the aircraft is within 1.5 seconds of the point of no return for collision with the ground and no action has been taken by the pilot.   source from http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=8335