Roger. Xwing
control ready to taxi.
Xwing caravan clear for takeoff.
This plane just took off on its own.
Don't have to do a thing.
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
touch the controls once.
Xwing is a technology startup that develops technology to
automate aircraft.
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
working on doing just that.
We started Reliable Robotics to create a new type of airline. An
airline where instead of having pilots in a cockpit, you have
pilots in a control center.
Rose previously worked directly with Elon Musk on Tesla's first
version of autopilot.
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
instantaneous as it has to be.
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
fly-by-wire flight controls
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
system.
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
still be on board.
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
control surfaces.
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
besides that, it felt like a normal flight. You know, I was a
little anxious going into this, knowing the pilot wasn't going
to actually do anything. But overall, it wasn't scary at all.
The planes are rigged with cameras, LIDAR and software
among a few things that can identify other aircraft and
detect potential issues. Rather than build a new plane, both
companies converted a Cessna Grand Caravan.
It's a lot easier and quicker to start with a tried and true
platform and make modifications to it to convert into an
unmanned aircraft than is to start from scratch. You can
already make all the assumptions around the airplanes air
worthiness, it has a track record of safety. And we can
really focus with the regulator on what modifications were made
to the aircraft to convert into an unmanned aircraft.
There obviously is a lot of energy right now going into
electric, vertical takeoff and landing urban Air Mobility,
advanced term abilities, but those aircraft have a ways to go
and they have their own technical problems that need to
be overcome. When we started the company, we decided that solving
the regulatory challenges was what was going to be our unique
differentiator. And you don't need to invent a new type of
aircraft to solve the regulatory challenges related to autonomous
operations.
I think a great deal has to do with where these systems are
being operated and less about the systems themselves. If we're
talking about operations over long rural, relatively
uninhabited regions, you know, that's going to be a lot easier
than vertical operations in urban areas. So when you see
systems proven, it's probably going to be more in that rural
setting, rather than in something urban.
Both companies are not able to operate its pilotless planes
commercially yet, because they're still working on getting
approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.
The nice thing about the FAA is that it does provide some
flexibility for you to be able to design a system to get to
those levels of safety and still fly it as you're designing. This
used to be a type certified aircraft or commercial aircraft,
that we downgraded to an experimental aircraft so that we
could do a lot of flight tests without needing to demonstrate
that level of safety prior to doing some of those flight
tests.
We gave the FAA a very thorough rundown of every aspect of our
system, and how we intended not only to develop it, but also
operate it and then show through test and analysis that it would
be safe to do so.
Similar to self driving cars, self flying planes will also
need lots of data.
We've been flying commercially with piloted aircraft on the
cargo side for larger logistics companies since December of last
year. This allows us to collect data along commercial routes at
scale that feeds into the training or algorithms, but also
the certification program.
Data helps algorithms learn how to deal with all situations,
including emergency landings. One of the problems that you
need to solve in automating an aircraft through all phases of
flight is you need to look at what could possibly go wrong in
each phase, and you have to methodically break down all of
these potential failures and develop a mitigation for every
single one of those failures. One advantage of an automated
aircraft system is it can recognize anomalous behavior
much faster, then an onboard human might recognize and then
respond to it much faster. So if you have for example, an engine
failure, we can trip an alarm immediately and then begin
executing an emergency response procedure. So the aircraft will
immediately get into a most desirable or safe configuration.
Notify the remote pilot who then in turn can notify air traffic
control, and then the remote pilot can help guide the
aircraft towards a desired emergency landing location.
Both companies aim to bring autonomous planes to the air
cargo industry first. The Global Air Cargo market is expected to
grow from $56.48 billion in 2020 to 99.67 billion in 2025. Both
plan to first fly cargo to remote areas in smaller planes.
Cargo stands out as the biggest opportunity space, specifically
small cargo planes, these planes tend to serve communities that
without air wouldn't be served otherwise. And for these types
of groups, we can serve them at a lower cost and higher
frequency than what they'd enjoy today.
Reliable Robotics is testing with a FedEx owned prototype.
FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc. have actually been looking at
automating these planes for quite a long time and they've
been looking for solutions. That aircraft like the Cessna Caravan
is by the numbers the world's most popular cargo plane. FedEx
operates over 230 of these in the US alone. UPS through a
bunch of partner companies has several 100 themselves as well.
Rose, who is also a pilot worked at SpaceX before he worked on
Tesla's autopilot.
I previously had automated fully autonomous spacecraft that that
went to the ISS at SpaceX, it could go to the International
Space Station with no human intervention. I'd worked on self
driving cars at Tesla that could go 70 miles an hour down the
280, thinking, why hasn't anybody done this in aviation?
Clearly, we possess the technology. Why can't regular
people experience automated flight? And the simple answer
is, it's really the regulatory environment is not there yet.
Though the companies are starting with cargo, the long
term plan is to carry passengers as well.
There's currently about 30 airports that make up 70% of air
travel, we're gonna see smaller aircraft flying at higher
frequencies. Out of more municipal regional airports, we
actually have 5000 airports in the US available for public use
today. But in order to use those, you either need to be a
private pilot or you need to be exceptionally wealthy. And what
automation will enable you to do is by lowering the cost of
getting into air travel will be able to build systems that work
much like an on demand ground transportation system like Uber
or Lyft. This technology
has the potential to open up a brand new market and
significantly scale, you know, grow that market.
Neither company knows when they will get approval, but both are
optimistic it will be in the next few years. But when will we
see commercial flights without a pilot? Though autopilot is very
advanced commercial flights still require two pilots in the
cockpit.
The level of automation in commercial aircraft, even in a
corporate aircraft is highly sophisticated, we can program
the airplane to take off and and especially to land all by
itself, we need to put the gear down and we need to put the
flaps down and that's essentially all the pilot really
has to do if it's programmed appropriately.
Airbus has conducted fully autonomous flight tests on it's
a350, which is a lot larger than the cessnas Xwing and Reliable
Robotics are testing. The wide body jet achieved autonomous
taxiing, takeoff and landing. Boeing has a number of defense
platforms that are autonomous and publicly stated it's looking
into pilotless aircraft. Safety is a big reason as to why. In
the 1960s, the world's airline fleet had a rate of 27.2
accidents per 1 million departures. Today with the
current generation of aircraft the rate is 1.5 accidents per 1
million departures.
There are situations where an autopilot is better than
actually flying your plane yourself. There are certain
weather requirements that require us to use the autopilot
in certain situations visibility down to a certain level and a
certain approach requires that we do use an autopilot.
While rare, 80% of all aviation accidents are caused by humans.
That figure includes pilots, air traffic controllers, and
mechanics. But the misunderstanding of automation
has been implicated in accidents. For example, the 2009
Air France flight that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on its
way to Paris, investigators concluded that autopilot had
turned itself off, and the pilots weren't able to take
manual control over the plane. More recently, the flight
control software of the two 737 max planes that crashed in 2018
and 2019 were cited as one of the reasons for the accident.
After it received wrong data from a sensor.
There was an engineering problem, there was a design
problem that the pilots themselves couldn't handle. And
the automation wouldn't have done it because it was the
automation that was the problem in the first place. So there's a
lot of philosophical sort of discussions we should be having,
before we continue with, you know, the idea of completely
pilotless airplanes.
But what about the pilots who fly these planes? Will robots be
taking their jobs? Xwings Piette says these are jobs that pilots
don't want.
So for pilots, this is probably the least sexy job out there
flying small cargo aircraft. And that's reflected in in the
numbers, right? I mean, retention rates are very low in
this industry. It's very hard to keep pilots typically, they've
flown these aircraft to accumulate enough hours to just
move up market and get jobs flying business jets or
commercial airliners.
Yeah, we would prefer to fly longer legs because it's less
stress, you know, on our bodies and our lifestyles. But, you
know, it's just, it's just part of the profession, flying
shorter legs. So I don't know if we'd necessarily want to give
that up and say, Hey, you know what, we're done with this.
We'll, we'll hand this off to a computer. If something goes
wrong with that airplane that could be a danger to pilot
airplanes in the sky as well.
Analysts predict pilot shortages are becoming a problem - sped up
in part by the pandemic. One analysis sees a shortage of
34,000 pilots by 2025, almost 10% of the workforce. Airbus
expects the global fleet to grow by over 38,000. By 2038. It
calculated a need of over half a million pilots to fly them.
Some people would call it an impending pilot shortage other
would say that the pilot shortage is real, it's actually
here. That's applying a lot of pressure on the industry with
increases in demand in e-commerce and other forms of
travel, people are demanding much more flexibility in the
operations of their aircraft. But pilots are typically trained
to just fly one type of plane at a time. You fly that type of
plane for some period of time, you train on a new type and then
you fly that type. The cargo operators however, would like
the ability to fly a small plane one day and then switch to a
larger aircraft the next day, but they can't do that. Because
now you need to have say double or triple the number of pilot on
staff. Automated aircraft enable us to dynamically up gauge and
down gauge aircraft is to select a larger vehicle or a smaller
vehicle based on the need. It also allows us to geographically
reposition aircraft based on needs.
Do you see a future where we don't need pilots at all? I'm
definitely not going to say no. You know, there's the increasing
level of automation that's taking place across various
industries. And that's changing the nature of jobs in general.
This is no different. Economic needs that are out there for
regional transportation are enormous. And right now they're
unfulfilled using existing modes of transportation. And if we
need to rely on pilots to fill that gap, we're going to need an
exponential the larger number of pilots or next decade and a
half.
But one former pilot remains skeptical.
Would I ever fly in a pilotless airplane? No.
Absolutely not.
The future of aviation has so many possibilities from electric
planes to air taxis and pilotless planes, all of which
is building on technological advancements that have been made
since flight was invented. NASA has been flying unmanned
spacecraft for decades. Today, the SpaceX Crew Dragon is fully
autonomous, but can also be controlled manually if needed.
The expectation of reliability in the aviation domain is orders
of magnitude higher than what you see in space, it's quite a
bit different. In aviation, you're talking about a system
that is going to be used by millions, probably billions of
people, and you're operating over the heads of everyone else.
When the FAA does finally approve pilotless planes, the
next hurdle will be convincing the public that it's safe.
Although a 2019 survey did show that seven out of 10 people
would fly in a plane with no pilot.
It'll happen with cargo planes before it happens with passenger
planes. But that's almost certainly coming within the next
15 to 20 years, you know, a lot of it's just gonna come down to
the level of encryption that can be provided from ground based
backup systems, you know, absolutely foolproof, anywhere
in the world, guaranteed intervention via remote data.
When that day comes, then maybe it'll be considered and will
happen within a few years. But realistically not before.
Although some smaller plans only require one pilot, two are
required on large passenger and cargo planes, due to aircraft
certification and FAA regulations. The next step may
be a single pilot cockpit. According to one estimate,
single pilot operations could save airlines as much as $60
billion annually and operational costs and up to 110 billion for
fully autonomous flight.
It's gonna take a long time to get to that day, part of it is
going to be regulatory, part of it's going to be psychological,
part of it's going to be insurance. I think it's
conceivable, but it's a very, very, very long way off, we're
talking something that's probably 40 or 50 years away at
best.
Let's go back to the Hudson River. You know, think about
that. I mean, the innovation and the cockpit resource management
that was involved with those two pilots and they still fault
themselves for things that they did wrong that they felt they
could have done better, but it was brought down by a well
experienced well seasoned flight crew.
Though there are skeptics on our approach in the Xwing plane, the
computer kept us on a perfect glide path to the runway.