An App for Land a plane in an emergency

An American has invented an iPad app that can help steer a path to the nearest safe airport should a plane’s engine fail

Austin Meyer, an aerospace enthusiast, developed the Xavion app to help small aircraft land in emergencies, provide back ups of in-flight instruments, and provide point-to-point navigation. The developer claims that it also calculates an estimated time of arrival, and fuel burn.

Throughout a flight, the app runs simulations every second that mimic what would happen to the plane in the event of engine failure, checking how a plane would continue to all the runways within gliding range. For each, it estimates the chances of a successful landing based on the runway’s length, width, and proximity to the aircraft.

If there was a loss of power, it would plot a course to the nearest safe runway, based on the plane's speed and altitude, and the surrounding terrain. The app would then use the plane's autopilot function to steer the aircraft along this route to the ground.

Slightly disconcertingly however, the Xavion site explains that in the event of an engine failure, “GRAVITY will always work” and that all a pilot needs “to USE this gravity engine with 100 per cent success is GUIDANCE!” The distance-to-runway calculation function enables the pilot to “tell at glance exactly what airports you would be able to reach (or not!) in the event of an engine failure.”

The connection to an aircraft’s autopilot is via Wi-Fi – although it was not made clear how it would work if a network was not available.

The app also gathers data throughout the flight on location and altitude, and uses an iPad or iPhone’s GPS sensors to trace ground-track, ground-speed, altitude and vertical speed.

However, the developers found that these devices’ sensors were of limited use in an emergency situation, so recommend using external GPS devices as a back up.

A spokesperson for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association told the Daily Mailthat such technology could be available to all pilots in the future, but at present was “suitable only for a small percentage of top-end private aircraft with an autopilot.” At present the majority of small craft are still controlled manually, so the app would not be compatible with them.

Xavion, which costs $199 on the Apple app store, has undergone hundreds of hours of testing in flight simulators, acoording to its creators, and in a Columbia 400 aeroplane, a fixed gear low-wing aircraft, around Columbia, South Carolina.