{"id":147734,"date":"2023-09-27T10:15:33","date_gmt":"2023-09-27T14:15:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=147734"},"modified":"2023-09-24T16:20:44","modified_gmt":"2023-09-24T20:20:44","slug":"a-kc-135s-autopilot-turned-on-or-off-without-prompting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=147734","title":{"rendered":"A KC-135’s autopilot turned on or off without prompting"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Flight crews on a KC-135 reported, back in 2021, that the autopilot turned on or off without human interaction in the middle of a flight. One of the unauthorized autopilot commands turned the airplane towards the ground. The aircraft was flying under 3,000 feet when one of these automatic actions occurred.<\/p>\n

From the Air Force Times:<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

In early 2021, KC-135 crews began reporting incidents of the autopilot turning on or off, unprompted, during flight. That has caused the jets to unexpectedly tilt toward the ground or pitch upward, including in at least one instance when the aircraft was within 3,000 feet of the ground.<\/p>\n

The issue has occurred five times since May 2021, Air Force spokesperson 1st Lt. James Stewart said. All but one of those instances happened between May 2021 and May 2022.<\/p>\n

The Air Force initially said a faulty power supply caused the autopilot to malfunction, but later attributed the problem to an error in the program’s code, defense technology publication The War Zone reported last year. Collins Aerospace, which designed the software, was expected to begin testing fixes in April 2022.<\/p>\n

The Air Force is still rolling out the software patch across its fleet of more than 300 KC-135s, Stewart said. The service did not answer how many KC-135s are flying the original Block 45 software and how many have the updated version.<\/p>\n

Block 45 was installed on 272 aircraft as of March 2023, according to the service’s budget documents. It is slated for use on 329 airframes based on the C-135 — all but a few dozen of which are KC-135s — plus 19 pilot simulators and five cockpit simulators.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Air Force Times provides additional information here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Flight crews on a KC-135 reported, back in 2021, that the autopilot turned on or off … A KC-135’s autopilot turned on or off without prompting<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-air-force"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=147734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147734\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=147734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=147734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=147734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}