Skyryse announces emergency autoland capability coming to SkyOS, bringing automated safe landings to both helicopters and airplanes

Skyryse announced plans to introduce an emergency autoland capability for both helicopters and airplanes. The feature will be integrated within SkyOS, representing a significant advancement in automated flight safety for pilots and passengers – especially for helicopters, where emergency landings are particularly complex and autoland has never been available.

Skyryse Founder and CEO Mark Groden commented: “By creating a holistic software-hardware solution like SkyOS, we’re able to develop and integrate lifesaving features like emergency autoland at unprecedented speed. When we started the company, we focused on flight automation in helicopters first because that is the hardest engineering challenge to solve. Every other aircraft is a subset of those requirements. Helicopters operate in environments where pilot workload is extremely high, and margins are often razor-thin, and that’s why we’re especially proud to take the 10 years of development and testing we’ve put into SkyOS to date, and continue to add features and capabilities that the aviation industry needs most. SkyOS allows us to treat airplanes and helicopters as software-defined vehicles, enabling levels of automation that simply weren’t practical with legacy systems.”

SkyOS’ emergency autoland capability will enable any aircraft to execute a safe emergency landing sequence with the swipe of a finger, leveraging the system’s triply redundant fly-by-wire architecture that includes human-machine interface, advanced sensor fusion suite, and software-defined flight control laws. By autonomously managing the entire landing sequence in emergency situations, SkyOS’ emergency autoland will maintain a safe and stable aircraft profile, navigate to a suitable landing site, manage energy, and perform approach and touchdown. Unlike legacy autoland systems, which are currently confined to airplanes and typically limited to specific models, Skyryse’s approach treats emergency autoland as a core SkyOS function, allowing for deterministic performance and scalable deployment across multiple aircraft categories.

When engaged, either by pilots or passengers, SkyOS’ emergency autoland monitors aircraft altitude, speed, trajectory, and envelope limits. Then, while managing power, SkyOS autonomously executes a controlled approach and landing appropriate to the environment. SkyOS’ emergency autoland capability will build on existing SkyOS features, including inherent stability and simplified flight controls, as well as dynamic envelope protection, including terrain awareness and obstacle detection, as well as fuel monitoring and weather assessment. 

For helicopters in particular, autoland represents a significant safety upgrade. Helicopter operations routinely involve low-altitude flight, confined landing areas, high pilot workload, and complex energy management, especially during emergencies such as pilot incapacitation, degraded visibility, or system failures. Historically, these factors have made automated landing solutions for helicopters extremely difficult to deploy. Skyryse’s emergency autoland continues the company’s legacy in creating first-ever, lifesaving technology, including having successfully automated engine-out landing, also known as an autorotation (which is one of the most complicated emergency scenarios to navigate in a helicopter). 

Across aviation, accidents during takeoff and landing are more common than during any other phase of flight. This is because pilots are in transition with some of the highest workloads, requiring intricate coordination of various systems and pilot attention. Skyryse has also automated the helicopter pickup and set-down sequence, empowering pilots to initiate these critical phases with a swipe of a finger. 

Skyryse expects SkyOS’ autoland feature to support use cases such as pilot incapacitation, spatial disorientation, severe weather encounters, and other emergency situations. Development and certification for integration into helicopters will proceed in close coordination with regulators, following certification of Skyryse One.