A popular model of cargo plane has achieved its first uncrewed flight thanks to a Silicon Valley aviation company.
Reliable Robotics announced earlier this month that they had successfully flown and landed a Cessna 208 Caravan from Hollister Municipal Aircraft with no pilot aboard.
Though the 12-minute flight was supervised remotely by a qualified pilot, almost all the work was done by the aircraft's retrofitted computer systems.
The Mountain-View-based company says it was the first time a cargo plane of this size has been flown remotely by a private enterprise – marking a new milestone in the rapid advance of autonomous aviation.
"Cessna has made 3,000 Caravans — it’s the most popular cargo plane you’ve never heard of," Reliable's chief executive Robert Rose told CNN. "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."
Uncrewed aircraft are nothing new in themselves. Military drones saw widespread use in the Vietnam War, and today such craft are as common under ordinary civilians’ Christmas trees as they are on the battlefields of Ukraine.
But now private companies such as Reliable are trying to go a step further by building full-size pilotless cargo or passenger aircraft that can integrate into the world's existing air travel infrastructure.
Rather than being directly controlled with a joystick, Reliable's flight on 21 November involved a human pilot sending simple commands to the plane's autonomous systems, which then executed manoeuvres such as taxiing onto the runway, taking off, and landing safely.
The company believes such systems could both alleviate a global pilot shortage and reduce crashes for small, rugged aircraft such as the Caravan, which often fly close to the ground in mountainous terrain.
"I have family that lives up in Oregon and there's not really commercial air service to get to go visit them, but there are small airports. "So if we had small aircraft that had this level of automation, I could say on a moment's notice go visit my family," Mr Rose told San Francisco broadcaster ABC 7.
He argued that such technology would create new jobs for pilots rather than automating them away because it would allow airlines to run many more flights in total, all likely requiring some human supervision.'
The company is currently seeking certification for the Caravan from the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), and hopes in future to begin testing it on jet cargo aircraft.
