Name: Here's What It's Like Flying In A Plane With No Pilot
Uploaded: 2021-05-15T16:54:24.000Z
Duration: 19 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

There's a pilot in the cockpit but everything on this Cessna

Grand Caravan is automated. Xwing, a start-up in the Bay

Area took CNBC up for a test flight, where the pilot didn't

Xwing is a technology startup that develops technology to

Over the past 100 years, the technology inside airplanes has

become more and more advanced, from jumbo jets to smaller

cessnas. Most of the flying happening today has a high level

of automation, but pilots are still doing a lot of work. On

commercial flights,  for example, pilots are telling the

autopilot what to do, you don't just set it and forget it. But

some see the next step to full automation as removing the pilot

completely. Reliable Robotics is another Bay Area start-up

We started Reliable Robotics to create a new type of airline. An

airline where instead of having pilots in a cockpit, you have

Rose previously worked directly with Elon Musk on Tesla's first

We're definitely going to see autonomous aircraft well before

autonomous driving at scale. Driving has a huge number of

technical challenges as well as regulatory challenges. Whereas

with aviation, it's a much more tractable technical problem and

you have a regulatory environment that is ready to go.

Boeing recently demonstrated a successful autonomous flight of

its loyal wingman fighter jet, and Airbus recently performed

fully autonomous test flights on one of its larger commercial

aircraft. The technology is here, we want it to explore how

it works, and when pilotless planes will become the norm.

Before we look at what's happening today, let's take a

quick look back at how we got here. In 1903, the Wright

brothers took their first powered flight, and a few short

years later, the first iteration of autopilot was created.

Laurence Sperry's gyro stabilizer helped automatically

balanced the plane so the pilot wouldn't have to. Fast forward

to the 1950s and the rise of commercial aviation. At the

time, five people were needed in the cockpit to fly the plane.

Two pilots,  a flight engineer, a radio operator and a

navigator. That number decreased over the next few decades.

In the late 70s and early 80s. We went from three crew to two

crew. The level of automation today, of course is much greater

in terms of what the workload of that crew actually looks like.

One of the first digital autopilot systems was used in

the lunar module that landed Apollo astronauts on the moon.

Although Neil Armstrong had to turn it off to land in a safer

area on the moon surface. Then in the 70s, NASA introduced

digital fly-by-wire systems. Fly-by-wire is basically

utilizing electronics rather than cables and pulleys, so to

speak, to manipulate flight controls. It's practically

The F 16 fighter jet was the first mass production

fly-by-wire jet. And that was a major breakthrough and it is now

inconceivable that a jetliner would be designed without

Autopilot evolved into higher levels of automation. The

military has flown remotely operated drones since World War

Two, and has continued to improve the technology. But

these military drones are not built to fly people and often

require video streams for remote operators to fly them. One

reason the military has continued to work on this is for

safety. The constant adjustments a computer makes versus a human

ensures for a much smoother and safer ride. 2017 was the safest

year in aviation worldwide on record. In the US, there has not

been a fatal crash since 2009. Here's how Reliable Robotics and

Xwing's technology works. Both companies have developed

software that allows them to remotely operate the plane from

the ground, if anything were to go wrong.

There's no joystick, you're not remotely sticking the plane with

our system, we give the remote pilot essentially an interface

that lets them specify all of this information. Load it all

into the system and then press execute. And then that is then

transferred through a SATCOM link up to the aircraft,

You can make an aircraft autonomous, that aircraft still

needs to communicate to the to a human, that human is the air

traffic controller. Those operators don't fly the

aircraft. Initially, they're going to be pilots because they

need to know how to communicate with air traffic control and how

these aircrafts integrate in the airspace. But they don't need to

know how to fly or land or take off. That's done entirely by our

Reliable Robotics already did a test flight without anyone in

the aircraft and we got to go up with Xwing on one of its test

flights. The remote operator initiated our takeoff and off we

went. Do your instincts want to grab the yoke. To be

honest it was very alarming the first time it landed itself.

Even though the plane is flying on its own, a safety pilot must

So what we've done here is every time a pilot is involved

interacting with the aircraft, we've automated that

interaction, whether it be the throttles the brakes, the

So we just got back from a fully autonomous flight with Xwing.

And my first impressions are that it was pretty normal, the

controls and the yoke were moving around by themselves. But

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Here's What It's Like Flying In A Plane With No Pilot

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