“The aircraft, a converted Cessna Caravan, performed autonomous taxiing, takeoffs, route navigation, and landings under remote supervision from Joby’s Autonomy Headquarters in California and Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, up to 2,323 miles away. The journey demonstrated the operational capabilities of Joby’s autonomy technology across a range of environments, supporting applications in commercial freight, medical transport, disaster response, and defense logistics.”
We can see 2 ways future air travel may get much cheaper now that electric powered flight is becoming a reality for smaller/mid-sized planes. Cheap fuel (electricity) & much lower staffing costs thanks to self-flying tech.
Will there one day be an airline that is 100% electric and only self-flying? Probably. This strikes me as a great option for people who live in more sparsely populated areas. They are not economical for the big airlines, but they may be for an all-electric self-flying airline.
Joby Completes First-Ever Fully Autonomous Flight Across the United States
Turns out I need to eat my words a little bit here. Airbus does have a plane that uses computer vision to take off and land, and taxi on the ground. And there’s systems to visually detect other planes in the sky to help with collision avoidance. But they’re not in passenger airliners yet because when the regulations were written decades ago, neural networks weren’t big yet so it apparently says that every line of code needs to be directly traced back to a requirement, which is hard to do with weights. This is being revamped as far as I can tell, but not just yet.