Ask HN: How long before the first civilian cargo flights are AI piloted?
Is it 2026? Within 2 years? 5 years? 10 years?
I can understand how passenger flights will take a while longer - but would cargo flights that don't have nearly the safety concerns would be AI piloted much sooner? If so, how much sooner?
5 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 21.1 ms ] threadTo first order, the bigger a vehicle is the less you worry about the cost of the pilot/driver. The biggest untold story in aviation is the battle between the pilots of small "regional aircraft" vs "mainline aircraft", the former of which generate less value for the same amount of work and necessarily get paid less. Unions have enforced "scope clauses" that have prevented a new generation of slightly larger regional aircraft which could lower costs at small airports and have no trouble getting filled as those lower costs get passed on to consumers. As it is small airports are dying out, harming smaller cities and towns and giving the "left behind" all the more reason to lash out.
Similarly there is a lot of a talk of crisis in truck driving, both at the local and long-haul levels. My brother-in-law has a CDL and he is always talking about how inexperienced drivers seem to wedge their trucks on a bridge in Binghamton once a month, stall out on the highway and get into accidents, etc.
If you say autopilot that implies a wildly different technology. I think the first successful autopilot landing with passengers onboard happened last week.
Taking off is much easier than landing and if passengers aren’t involved…
I guess the question is not about technology (might be ready now) and is instead about regulation (when will the FAA allow fully autonomous flights). I’m guessing the current generation of regulators will need to die before that happens so 25+ years.
To be clear, take-off is more than just the runway. It extends to the point where the aircraft has sufficient energy, which can be translated into time.
Flying a plane is all about energy. Speed, and altitude. One can be traded for another and both can be traded for time. In other words, the faster the plane, the higher the plane, the more options available to the pilot.
The most dangerous part of the flight is the initial climb just after takeoff. Speed is low. Height is very low. You are literally flying away from the runway. If an engine or 2 fail at this point crashing is a likely outcome. However how, and where, you crash matters a lot.
By contrast landings are much safer, the airplane has excess energy to play with, and is heading directly at a nice long flat piece of ground.
Auto-pilot takeoffs are "easy" only to the V2 mark, then they can get very complicated very quickly.
I'm still skeptic about driver-less taxis, even when commercial ones like Waymo are already running on the road. But at least taxis run in 2D regulated highways and most of the drivers are sane enough.
Auto pilot can be used for nearly everything after take-off and before landing, so I think you'll need to define "AI" here. I see people using "AI" almost interchangeably these days for things that plain old computers have been doing for a while now. Auto-pilot is not AI, its just a set of instructions (aka programming) given to a computer.
Airports have designed approaches, large airports have multiple and there is a need for communication with other humans, reacting to dynamic environments including weather, other aircraft (both airborne and on taxiways) and having actual vision out the cockpit to see things.