Though they’ve been around for a few years, emergency autoland systems are still fairly unproven.
Garmin Autoland—which is installed on more than 1,000 aircraft—got its first real-world test just a few months ago, performing admirably as it guided a Beechcraft King Air and its two occupants to safety.
The capability has never been offered for helicopters. Leonardo, which is developing an emergency autoland for its AW169 for cases of low or zero visibility, is one of the few companies that has dared to even explore it.
California-based Skyryse said Thursday that it plans to introduce a universal emergency autoland capability for all aircraft—both fixed-wing and rotorcraft—that activates with a single tap on a touchscreen.
“If you have an incapacitated pilot, you’re probably going to be pretty stressed,” Mark Groden, founder and CEO of Skyryse, told FLYING. “You’re going to be worrying for that person’s health. There’s going to be a lot going on. And it would be so much easier to have, basically, a shortcut button for the passenger to press, and then they can focus on other things.”
Skyryse in 2025 demonstrated automated pickups and touchdowns with the swipe of a finger using Skyryse One—a Robinson R66 helicopter equipped with its SkyOS platform, which the company describes as a universal operating system for flight.
Groden said emergency autoland will be a core component of SkyOS. Skyryse so far has installed the operating system on the UH-60 Black Hawk and Cirrus SR-22, with planned integrations for the King Air, Bell 407, Pilatus PC-12, and Airbus H-125 and H-130.
But the company bills the system—and its accompanying autoland capability—as totally aircraft agnostic, designed to accommodate just about any airframe.
“Anyone in a car is diligent enough to reach over, grab the steering wheel, and steer the car to the side of the road,” Mark Groden, founder and CEO of Skyryse, told FLYING. “SkyOS makes the airplane or helicopter as close as it’s ever been to the user interface of an automobile in terms of safety and ease of use.”
Autoland for All
Groden said that when he founded Skyryse, the company had a simple mission—minimize the top causes of general aviation accidents, such as controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) or loss of control in flight (LOC-I). It quickly ballooned into something much larger.
“When you put the list of things that are killing people in this industry on the table and say, ‘We’re going to build a technology that solves these problems,’ the inherent scope of what you have to build in order to solve those problems turned out to be massive,” Groden said.
Beyond finger-swipe pickups and touchdowns, SkyOS provides dynamic envelope protection, terrain awareness, obstacle detection, fuel monitoring, and weather assessments. Groden said it could even enable uncrewed operations at a “10-9 level of reliability.”
The entire system is built on a triply redundant architecture, from the toaster-sized flight control computer and jam-tolerant electromechanical actuators up to the controls in the cockpit. Those controls are heavily simplified—the instrument panel, flight instruments, avionics, controls, and pedals are replaced by a four-axis joystick, pair of touchscreen displays, and fly-by-wire system.
Groden said the pilot interface is simple enough that someone with no experience could safely land the aircraft with only a “pinch hitting, five- to 15-minute course.” He said some people have piloted SkyOS-equipped helicopters near Los Angeles after just 15 minutes of training.
SkyOS has gotten the attention of customers from the U.S. Army—which is exploring the optionally piloted capability for its fleet of 2,400 Black Hawks—to emergency services providers such as Air Methods and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Still, the Skyryse chief said the industry is clamoring for even more. Per the International Air Transport Association, more than half of aviation accidents from 2005 to 2023 happened during landing. A recent Airbus analysis yielded similar findings.
Since Skyryse has done the hard work of testing and refining SkyOS over a decade, Groden said additions such as emergency autoland are simply “downhill putts.” Adding the capability, he said, is “trivial in comparison” to other projects the company has undertaken, such as equipping and flying a Black Hawk with SkyOS in just 91 days.
“We’ve solved the hardest problems in engineering and aerospace out of the gate, namely, automating a helicopter to the fullest capacity and designing a fully digital system for airplanes and helicopters,” Groden said.
How It Works
Skyryse in 2023 received a Guinness World Record for achieving the first engine-out automated autorotation with a helicopter. Whereas that capability solved for engine damage, SkyOS’ emergency autoland is intended to combat problems in the cockpit.
“It’s the addition of a button on the screen for a passenger to press in the event of an incapacitated pilot,” Groden said. “The capabilities that are then enacted by pressing that button are the same capabilities that are already built into the SkyOS architecture.”
Groden said pressing a button on the touchscreen display prompts the system to autonomously manage the entire landing sequence, from identifying and navigating to a suitable airport to performing the final approach and touchdown. Throughout, it keeps a stable flight profile, manages energy, and monitors altitude, speed, and trajectory, staying within the aircraft’s safety envelope.
For cases where a suitable airport cannot be located, Skyryse is exploring ways for SkyOS to guide the passenger through the descent, allowing them to swipe down to land.
Groden said the system requires a “series of confirmations” before engaging, making it “incredibly unlikely” that a passenger activates it erroneously. It can be disengaged if the pilot recovers or a passenger “doesn’t like what they’re seeing.”
The Skyryse chief contrasted the firm’s solution with standalone autoland systems, which he said are intended simply to outperform an incapacitated pilot. Often, passengers are required to remember complex steps and face a daunting wall of controls should they disengage. He said that SkyOS, in contrast, can take control “at a level of reliability that today does not exist anywhere in the industry.”
Regardless of the airframe, Groden said the SkyOS installation process is “effectively identical.” When the operating system is configured for a specific aircraft type, it uploads instructions for the appropriate emergency autoland configuration.
“The user interface and the cockpit between the airplane and helicopter is almost the same. The hardware is effectively identical,” Groden said. “The key difference is helicopters can stop and go backwards. Airplanes cannot.”
The Skyryse boss said the company is in the process of evaluating the emergency autoland feature on aircraft, but “all of the pieces that are necessary to offer the shortcut have already been tested.”
Before introducing emergency autoland, the company intends to obtain FAA certification for the core SkyOS system on the Skyryse One helicopter. After that, it will apply for supplemental type certifications to add autoland and other features, such as an AI copilot, Skylar.
Owners and operators of SkyOS-enabled aircraft will be able to equip those capabilities during routine maintenance visits to a certified A&P mechanic. Skyryse is further exploring over-the-air software updates, for which the FAA does not yet have a pathway. But it views that as only a marginal improvement over the ability to “bring your aircraft to the mechanic and say, ‘Hey, can you please update my software so I can get emergency autoland?’”
“That hasn’t existed in 100-plus years of aviation,” Groden said.
He expects SkyOS to improve rapidly as it racks up real-world flight hours and said emergency autoland is “just the beginning.”
Groden added that the environment created by the current administration—which featured an image of a SkyOS-powered cockpit in its AAM National Strategy —“couldn’t be more positive” for the company’s prospects.
“The willingness and the enthusiasm from this administration about shepherding new technology into aviation and the aerospace industry at large is better than we’ve seen for many decades,” he said.
