Automatic landing in fog ✈️

The vast majority of landings are completed manually.

However, to enable flight operations to continue in low visibility conditions, aircraft have the ability to conduct autolands.

For an aircraft to be able to land automatically, we need to setup and brief for the approach slightly differently.

We also require certain ground equipment to be operational at the landing airport, such as a CAT 2/3 certified ILS, specific runway lighting and the airport being in Low Visibility Procedures etc.

An ILS (Instrument Landing System) is a system that transmits 2 radio signals from the runway - one along the extended centreline, called the localiser, and another that provides vertical guidance, called the glide slope, which usually extends from the touchdown point up at an angle of 3 degrees.

The aircraft receives this information and displays it to the pilots in the form of a localiser and glide slope pointer on a scale. This indicates where the aircraft is in relation to the centreline and glide slope.

The pilots (or autopilot) will then adjust the ground track and rate of descent to keep the pointers in the centre of the scale, which will guide the us down to the runway.

There are 3 categories of ILS approaches.

Cat 1: This normally requires a min visibility of 550 meters and cloud base of 200 ft and will be flown manually.

CAT2: This is the first category of autoland and normally requires a visibility of 300 meters and cloud base of 100ft.

CAT 3: This category has 3 sub categories - CAT 3A, 3B and 3C. Each require specific aircraft systems and enable operations in lower visibilities.

The 737 autoland begins at 50 feet above the runway.

At 50 ft, the aircraft transitions into FLARE mode. This gently pitches the nose of the aircraft up to reduce the rate of descent.

At 27 ft, the auto throttle slowly closes the thrust levers to idle.

After touchdown, the auto speed brake will deploy the spoilers and the pilot will deploy the thrust reversers and disengage the autopilot.

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