Commercial cargo plane successfully completes crewless flight

[Shawn Knight]

Why it matters: A Silicon Valley aviation company recently completed a successful flight of a Cessna 208B Caravan cargo plane autonomously. The historic flight took place on November 21 but flew under the radar until now. The pilotless system, a creation of Reliable Robots, was retrofitted to a plane that took off from Hollister Municipal Airport and landed safely roughly 12 minutes later with nobody aboard.

The taxi, the takeoff, the cruise, and the landing were all done autonomously, said commercial piolet and Reliable Robots engineer Danah Tommalieh. A pilot did supervise the flight, but was located some 50 miles away at Reliable's control center.

Reliable Robots collaborated with the plane's manufacturer, Textron Aviation, to outfit it with all of the requisite hardware and software for full autonomy. The platform agnostic system also features multiple layers of redundancy for safety's sake, and is said to be able to avoid controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) and loss of control in flight (LOC-I), which collectively account for most aviation fatalities.

Textron Aviation is well known in the aviation community as the manufacturer of Cessna, Beechcraft, and Hawker branded aircraft. The Cessna 208B Caravan is one of the world's most popular turboprop utility aircraft with more than 3,000 units having been delivered to date. It can carry over 3,000 pounds of cargo and can utilize shorter runways, making it ideal for transportation of time-sensitive, same-day and next-day shipments. Eventually, the system could even find its way to passenger flights and give travelers more flexibility when booking a flight.

Back in October, Reliable announced it was working with the US Air Force to determine how its autonomous flight control system could work in large multi-engine military craft like the KC-135 Stratotanker refueling jet to increase utilization and reach near continuous operation without having to worry about concerns like crew repositioning.

According to a report from The Independent, Reliable Robots is seeking FAA certification for its system and hopes to start testing on larger cargo aircraft in the future.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/101326-commercial-cargo-plane-successfully-completes-crewless-flight.html

 

[Scshadow]

The question is not if you could do this, its whether you should do this. If a pilot is remote, then some big wig corporate executive will decide he can hire less pilots and have them remotely manage more planes. The planes will get old, they will cut corners on maintenance. And eventually it will all stack up into a catastrophe.

 

[TomSEA]

I worked for a major air carrier for several years and this technology has been around for a long, long time. Basically, pilots are there for emergency purposes - all other functions (including takeoffs and landings) are almost completely automated.

The main problem is getting the public and investors to buy into it. Who wants commercial pilotless aircraft flying around? Not many...

 

[loki1944]

Lol; no thanks

 

[loki1944]

I worked for a major air carrier for several years and this technology has been around for a long, long time. Basically, pilots are there for emergency purposes - all other functions (including takeoffs and landings) are almost completely automated.

The main problem is getting the public and investors to buy into it. Who wants commercial pilotless aircraft flying around? Not many...

Well the human is the most crucial as he is self aware and not bound by if/then rails; critical thinking and intitiave are the name of the game. I would have died a couple times on flights, convoys, and driving if it was left to the ignorant limitations of AI.

 

[VariableSpike]

We already have autoland and other systems on big jets dependent on the destination airport and conditions, the pilots are mainly there for general operations and to be there for if trouble hits the fan unexpectedly, along with the human factor that no one is getting on a plane that has no pilots physically present, of course different for cargo, but with how expensive air freight is, I imagine most companies would rather there was someone in the pilot seat no matter what systems exist

 

[takaozo]

Cargo planes? Why not. But move their flight path away from any city.

 

[Angga B]

The problem is always the asymmetrical risk. It never went away with machines, you see, with human pilot/driver he/she will endurethe lethal risks of making the wrong judgement and movement. Machines, non sentient being (for now), simply do not. They could make any kind of mistake and thus killed but still able to respawn another day. Not to mention current laws do not really pay attention on the accountability of machine actions and their impact to human lives.

But who am I to say further if most people are simply impressionable by tech. Or worse, already worship on the altar of the "scientology", pun intended.

 

[toooooot]

Good idea for cargo flights without humans on board.
I only think that for compete safety this plane needs both, remote control system and completely autonomous AI pilot.