Plane flew with no pilot on board

 A cargo plane flew 50 miles with no pilot on board 

One of the world’s most widely used cargo Cessna 208B aircraft completed an entire flight with no one on board for the first time. Lasting approximately 12 minutes in total, the flight departed from Hollister Airport, in Northern California, and was operated by Reliable Robotics, which has been working since 2019 on a semi-automated flying system in which the aircraft is controlled remotely by a pilot. Cargo plane flew 50 miles with no pilot on board earlier this month. 

The innovation could one day help combat a growing pilot shortage. A common cargo plane marked 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 centre 50 miles away.

The company recently announced that the 50-mile flight took place in November. The plane was a Cessna Caravan, a robust single-engine aircraft that is a popular choice for flight training, tourism, humanitarian missions and regional cargo. “Cessna has made 3,000 Caravans — it’s the most popular cargo plane you’ve never heard of,” says Robert Rose, CEO of Reliable Robotics. “Pilots will tell you it’s the workhorse of the industry. But the challenge with this aircraft is that it flies at lower altitudes and more adverse weather conditions than many large aircraft do today. So operating it is much more dangerous, and automation is going to go a long way to improve the safety of these operations.”

There are currently 900 Caravans in active service, and FedEx — which has been using the type since 1985 — is the largest operator with about 200 of them. Reliable Robotics is now working with the Federal Aviation Administration to certify its technology for commercial operations, and expects that process to be complete in as little as two years. 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 pilot sends signals to the aircraft through encrypted satellite signals. It uses an interface similar to those used by air traffic controllers.

The remote operator , a real pilot who must be certified to fly the aircraft exactly as if they were sitting in the cockpit, sends commands to the plane via encrypted satellite signals, but does not pilot the aircraft in real time nor gets any visual feed from the plane itself. The interface they use is closer to those used by air traffic controllers than drone pilots. This is not a video game. 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. 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. "You could say that the aircraft is autonomous," Rose said. "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.

Airlines have been struggling to hire enough qualified pilots to keep up with demand amid an on going 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. "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," Sourced said. 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.

Larger planes

Once the system becomes commercially available, other security measures will come into effect, including a smart card that will be required to operate any aircraft. In addition, pilots will work from a control centre where other people will be watching over them. For now, Reliable Robotics is looking to certify the system for the Caravan, but is already testing it on a larger aircraft with the US Air Force — the KC-135 Stratotanker, a military refuelling plane based on the old Boeing 707 — and hopes to start testing on jet cargo aircraft within five to 10 years. Remotely controlled regional cargo planes would have positive effects on both safety and the on going pilot shortage. The pilot shortage is putting pressure on smaller aircraft operations, because the larger planes are sucking up all the pilots, and it’s becoming much more difficult to sustain operations with smaller aircraft fleets.

Significant milestone

The history of pilotless aircraft goes back to the early years of aviation, with the first examples of unmanned planes developed in the US and Britain during World War I. Most unmanned aerial vehicles today are categorized as drones, performing a range of functions from military action to search and rescue and photography. Merlin Labs and XWing, both in the US, and Volant in the UK, are among the companies developing similar systems to Reliable Robotics, with a similar attention to the cargo sector.

In recent years, the concept of pilotless air taxis has also gained interest, with a first historic flight performed by German company Volocopter in Dubai in 2017; the Emirate is now planning to inaugurate its first “vertiport” for flying taxis within three years, albeit using vehicles manned by human pilots. In China, urban air mobility company EHang was the first to obtain, in October, full certification from the local authorities to fly a pilotless passenger-carrying UAV — the result of over 40,000 test flights. According to Jack W. Langelaan, a professor of Aerospace Engineering at Penn State University, who’s not involved with Reliable Robotics, the company has achieved a significant milestone by completing a flight from hangar to hangar without an on-board pilot.

“We can’t anticipate everything and we need to prove that the robotic ‘pilot’ is at least as competent as a good human pilot. Fitting into the air traffic control system is also tricky: at the moment it’s managed by humans talking to each other by radio, so Reliable used a remote pilot to manage this aspect of the flight. And of course, the human remote pilot was also ready to step in to deal with the unexpected.”

Gary Crichlow, head of commercial analysts at consultancy firm AviationValues, agrees that the technology to enable uncrewed operations is impressive. “That being said, the jump between crewed operations and uncrewed operations on a global scale is an extremely large one,” he cautioned. “It’s not just about the technology, it’s also about the economics and politics of replacing a highly skilled group of people with that technology. If anything, I’d expect those barriers to be even more difficult to overcome than the technological hurdles.”