Free Republic

A California-based company announced recently it had successfully flown a small cargo plane with no pilot on board. Reliable Robotics, a maker of aircraft automation systems, called last month's successful autonomous flight of a Cessna 208B Caravan with no one on board, was a first for the aviation industry. The flight of the Cessna 208B Caravan happened just outside San Jose on Nov. 21. The Mountain View-based company said that a remote pilot supervised the pilot-less aircraft from Reliable’s control center 50 miles away.

Wisk Aero, a startup founded in 2019 and backed by Boeing, has debuted its sixth generation remote-piloted “air taxi,” a yellow all-electric four-seat aircraft that can fly without a human pilot. The company touts its plug-in planes as the answer to city traffic congestion. The Boeing-backed company is hoping to get approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to carry passengers as part of a commercial air taxi service, according to a report by the Verge.

New Missions for Pilotless Aircraft by W. Thomas Smith Jr. (more by this author) Posted 12/09/2009 ET Two-and-a-half years ago when I was in Iraq, I remember -- among the sound of mortars, crackling gunfire, thundering helicopters, roaring jets, and the occasional (thankfully distant) IED explosions -- the somewhat-comforting sound of the remotely piloted little reconnaissance airplanes we’ve come to know as UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). Comforting, I say, because I knew that as long as those UAVs were up there, bad guys on the ground (who I and others could not see) were either being watched, having their freedom-of-movement...

FOXNews.com Pilotless Robot Bomber Squadron Heads for Afghanistan, Iraq Monday , July 16, 2007 BALAD AIR BASE, Iraq — The airplane is the size of a jet fighter, powered by a turboprop engine, able to fly at 300 mph and reach 50,000 feet. It's outfitted with infrared, laser and radar targeting, and with a ton and a half of guided bombs and missiles. The Reaper is loaded, but there's no one on board. Its pilot, as it bombs targets in Iraq, will sit at a video console 7,000 miles away in Nevada. The arrival of these outsized U.S. "hunter-killer" drones,...

Lockheed Martin Corp. has proposed an unmanned version of its Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35, which would make it the first full-scale fighter to operate without a pilot and signal the Bethesda weapons maker's push into the growing market for drone aircraft.