- A cargo plane flew 50 miles with no pilot on board earlier this month.
- The Cessna 208B aircraft was remote control-operated by a pilot from a control center.
- The innovation could one day help combat a growing pilot shortage, an aviation expert told CNN.
A common cargo plane flew a standard 50-mile route last month with no humans on board, marking a major milestone in a new era of automated aviation.
Reliable Robotics, an automation systems company based in California, touted the successful flight earlier this month after a Cessna 208B Caravan safely took off, flew, and landed with no pilot inside the plane.
The 12-minute flight departed from Hollister Airport in Northern California as a human pilot remotely operated the aircraft from a control center 50 miles away, according to a Reliable Robotics press release.
The flight system allows the Cessna plane to be remote control operated by a pilot from the ground. The model is meant to prevent loss of control mid-flight, as well as improve safety in relation to take-off and landing measures, the company said.
The pilot sends signals to the aircraft through encrypted satellite signals, CNN reported earlier this week. It uses an interface similar to those used by air traffic controllers.
“This is not a video game,” Robert Rose, CEO of Reliable Robotics, told the outlet. “There’s no joystick and you don’t have the ability to hand-fly the plane remotely.”
“There’s no video feed that gives you real-time feedback,” he added. “The way they control the aircraft is essentially a menu of options: you can think of it like a ‘choose your own adventure’ based on where the aircraft is, and there’s a set of buttons to allow the pilot to redirect the plane somewhere else.”
Every communication sent to the plane over the course of the flight also includes landing instructions in case of a future communication failure, the outlet reported.
“You could say that the aircraft is autonomous,” Rose told CNN. “If you tell it to do nothing else, or if you lose communications with it, it’s going to do the last thing you told it to do, which is the definition of autonomy. It has no direct human control.”
While talk of automated air control may strike fear in the hearts of AI skeptics, an aviation expert said the Reliable Robotics model is not a replacement for real-life pilots.
The system, which has been in the works since 2019, could end up addressing the current pilot shortage, David Soucie, an aviation expert, told CNN this week.
Airlines have been struggling to hire enough qualified pilots to keep up with demand amid an ongoing pilot shortage spurred in part by a post-pandemic boom in travel.
The automated flight model still requires a real-life pilot to operate the plane and pilots must be certified to fly the plane from the cockpit in order to use the automated system, CNN reported.
“But the difference is you don’t have to have a layover for a pilot; the number of hours they’re waiting to get on the next flight doesn’t have to occur, so it will have great impact on the shortage of pilots we have today,” Soucie told the outlet.
Rose told CNN that the system would help airlines streamline their operations as pilots work from a single location.
Reliable Robotics is currently working with the US military to try and apply the technology to larger aircraft, the company said earlier this month.
