BEA Presents: Clear to Land- 1968 Trident Promo Film (Part 2 of 3) - YouTube

Check out the pilot narrating the autoland, great timing!

The Trident autoland was March 1964.

EA had B727s with autoland built in the late '70s, I think. Was pretty basic, no autothrottles on most of them, fail passive. It worked good IF the captain retarded the throttles at the correct rate. Slow if was a long landing; too fast and it was the worst 727 landing you ever ride thru.

GF

Speak for yourself old man!

J.K.

What TW said ...
The 74 is easy enough to land most of the time and makes pilots look good if they simply land "by the numbers". With the autoland, it's all done exactly by the numbers and, in my experience, lands more consistently and smoother than pilots can.

Most aircraft will continue to track the centerline following an autoland (by tracking the localizer), but some are designed to disconnect as soon as the nose is down.

Joe

Or equipment level. The 737NG for example is available with a fail operational autopilot system that does an automatic rollout, however most airlines do not go for that option and in the case of the fail passive system it will disconnect with nose gear touchdown. The fail operational system is a very impressive kit, very consistent and smooth landings (best on GLS instead of ILS) and it has a higher crosswind limit than the fail passive one.

Interesting enough i found the 737NG fail operational system better than the A320 one, bit that may be personal preference. But in my experience the A320 can sometimes end the landing a bit high.

I believe the L-1011 was the first US manufactured aircraft to have auto land built in from the start and certified to use. If memory servers me correctly, the first US CAT 3 auto lands in the US occurred in ATL sometime shortly after the FAA give its blessing (to operators, aircraft and airports). Both Delta and Eastern air lines operated the L-1011 and on the some day in the late 70's or early 80's the weather was below CAT 2 in ATL. These were the first air carrier (CAT 3 and auto land) landings while in revenue service.

The C-141 had autoland but it was ugly and we never used it. It was certified in 63-64

I just did my first autoland in the actual aircraft. It was rough. About on par with my first landing during IOE. The sim did a great job on the other hand, so I would bet the quality of the ILS signal plays a major factor in the quality of the landing.

I believe Lockheed brought over the engineers from the Trident program to design the autoland in the L1011.