Skyryse Unveils Universal Emergency Autoland for Helicopters and Planes

SkyOS to bring automated safe landings to both rotorcraft and fixed-wing aircraft

Published on Mar. 9, 2026

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Skyryse, a leader in aviation automation, announced plans to introduce an emergency autoland capability for both helicopters and airplanes as part of its SkyOS operating system. The feature will enable any aircraft to execute a safe emergency landing sequence with the swipe of a finger, leveraging SkyOS' fly-by-wire architecture, advanced sensor fusion, and software-defined flight controls. This represents a significant advancement in automated flight safety, especially for helicopters where emergency landings are particularly complex and autoland has never been available before.

Why it matters

Accidents during takeoff and landing are the most common in aviation, as pilots face high workloads and complex coordination during these critical flight phases. Skyryse's universal emergency autoland capability aims to enhance safety by autonomously managing the entire landing sequence in emergency situations, maintaining a stable aircraft profile, navigating to a suitable landing site, and executing a controlled approach and touchdown. This is especially impactful for helicopters, which operate in challenging low-altitude environments with confined landing areas and high pilot workloads.

The details

SkyOS' emergency autoland will monitor aircraft altitude, speed, trajectory, and envelope limits, then autonomously execute a controlled landing appropriate to the environment while managing power. It builds on existing SkyOS features like stability, simplified flight controls, dynamic envelope protection, terrain awareness, obstacle detection, fuel monitoring, and weather assessment. For helicopters, autoland represents a significant upgrade, as their low-altitude, confined landing, and high-workload operations have historically made automated landing solutions extremely difficult to deploy.

  • Skyryse expects SkyOS' autoland feature to be available in 2026.
  • The company will proceed with development and certification for integration into helicopters in close coordination with regulators, following certification of Skyryse One.

The players

Skyryse

An aviation hardware and software company ushering in a new era in flight safety. Its core technology, SkyOS, is a universal operating system for flight that powers the Skyryse One aircraft.

Mark Groden

Founder and CEO of Skyryse, who stated the company focused on flight automation in helicopters first as the hardest engineering challenge to solve.

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What they’re saying

“By creating a holistic software-hardware solution like SkyOS, we're able to develop and integrate lifesaving features like emergency autoland at unprecedented speed.”

— Mark Groden, Founder and CEO (Globe Newswire)

“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.”

— Mark Groden, Founder and CEO (Globe Newswire)

What’s next

Skyryse will proceed with development and certification of the emergency autoland feature for integration into helicopters, following the certification of its Skyryse One aircraft.

The takeaway

Skyryse's universal emergency autoland capability represents a major advancement in flight safety, especially for helicopters which have historically lacked such automated landing solutions despite the inherent complexities of their operations. This software-defined approach could set a new standard for enhanced safety and simplified flight controls across the aviation industry.