70 Science & technology The EconomistNovember 30th 2019
1Evolutionhasnoforesight.Butoccasionallyitflukes something ideally suited to develop
intosomethingelse.Biologistscallthispreadaptation, and it seems to explain the
existenceofthreesmallbones,knownasossicles, that are found in the ears of
mammals.Ossiclesevolvedfromjawbones,and the fossil evidence indicates this
happenedthreetimes.Thatsuggeststhebones in question were indeed preadapted.
Anda newlydiscoveredCretaceousmammalcalled Jeholbaatar kielanaemay help
explainwhy.Ananalysisofthecreature’sjaw(pictured, with the ossicles enclosed in the
whitesquare)hasjustbeenpublishedinNatureby Wang Yuanqing of the Chinese
AcademyofSciencesandhiscolleagues.Itsuggests that the ossicles’ precursors became
detachedfromtheotherjawbonesasa resultof the way, indicated by the shape of
thoseotherbones,thatJeholbaatarkielanaechewed its food. Thus liberated, they were
thenabsorbedintotheearandrepurposedtoenhance the animal’s hearing.What’sthisear?O
n november 9th 2018a Piper Dakota
light aircraft flying over Iowa broadcast
a distress call. The pilot seemed to have
suffered a heart attack. One of the other
three people on board, a student aviator,
had taken over the controls, but to no avail.
The plane crashed shortly afterwards, kill-
ing all four.
How often such things happen is not
well recorded. But an Australian report
published in 2016 listed 15 cases in the five
years from 2010 to 2014 of the pilots of
small aircraft being incapacitated. In three
of these the aircraft suffered what is known
euphemistically in aviation circles as a
“collision with terrain”. Occasionally, an
instructor on the ground, perhaps assisted
by a pilot flying alongside in another air-
craft, has been able to provide an instant
flying lesson to someone on board a plane
that has lost its pilot, and talk them down
successfully. But not often. It is tricky
enough for a neophyte to keep an aircraft
flying straight, level and on an appropriate
bearing to arrive at a suitable airfield. Land-
ing the thing safely takes a miracle. What
small aircraft need in these circumstances
is a panic button. And a firm called Garmin
has now created one.
Garmin, a Swiss-registered, American-
operated technology company, is best
know for its gpssatellite-based navigation
systems. But the firm also makes electronic
control systems for aircraft. Autoland, as
they dub the kit attached to their panic but-
ton, is a result of putting the two together.
Pressing the button switches control of
the plane to its flight computers, in a man-
ner similar to engaging an autopilot. Gar-
min’s system, however, goes far beyond be-
ing a standard autopilot. It transmits an
emergency radio code to alert air-traffic
control and other planes in the area. It ana-
lyses weather conditions, winds and the
amount of fuel available before selecting a
suitable airfield to divert to. It then flies to
that airport, descends, lines up on the run-
way, sets the flaps and lowers the landing
gear. As it approaches touchdown, it crabs
the plane slightly sideways to cope with
any crosswinds and aligns the nose with
the centre of the runway, just as a human
pilot would. Once landed, it applies the
brakes to bring the plane to a halt. It then
turns the engine off.
Passengers are kept informed about
what is happening via messages on a
screen and voice announcements. They areadvised not to touch the controls, but to sit
back and fasten their seat belts. Simplified
buttons that appear on a touchscreen let
them operate the radio and talk to air-traf-
fic controllers directly.
After around 1,000 successful test land-
ings, Autoland is now going into service. It
is about to become a standard feature on
the Piper m600/sls, a six-seater single-en-
gined turboprop, and the Cirrus Vision Jet,
a single-engined personal jet. Other air-
craft are expected to follow. And Garmin is
also looking at making a version which
could be employed in smaller planes, such
as those used at flying clubs.
Eventually, a beefier variant might also
be developed for jet airliners. Though these
operate with a co-pilot to backup the cap-
tain, there have been instances of both pi-
lots being taken ill—for instance with hyp-
oxia caused by insufficient oxygen. In such
a case a member of the cabin crew or a pas-
senger might be able to switch the system
on. Alternatively, it could be activated
automatically or remotely.
If an unsupervised system like this can
fly and land an aircraft in an emergency, it
does raise the question of why it should not
do so routinely. Bailey Scheel, the manager
of the project is firm that, for the moment,
Autoland is purely an emergency system.
Nevertheless, it does look like another step
on the road to dropping the co-pilot—and
eventually the pilot, too. 7An automatic landing system that
passengers can use in an emergencyAviationThe panic button
I
n the pastfew decades wind and solar
power have gone from being exotic tech-
nologies to quotidian pieces of engineer-
ing that are competitive, joule for joule,
with fossil fuels. Those fuels retain what
edge they have only because of their reli-
ability. The wind may not blow, or the sun
may not shine, but—short of a blockade or
strike—a coal or gas power station will al-
ways have something to burn.
To overcome the reliability problem re-
quires cheap grid-scale energy storage that
can be scaled up indefinitely. At the mo-
ment, the market leader is the lithium-ion
battery (see Business section). Such batter-
ies—already the workhorse of applications
from mobile phones to electric cars—are
reliable, scalable and well understood.
Most proposed alternatives are clumsy,
poorly understood, unscalable or all three.
But there is one that, because it relies on
putting together pieces of engineering
used routinely elsewhere, and thus proven
to work, might give lithium-ion batteries aElectrical energy can be captured as
liquid airGrid-scale power storage