Almost a year ago, a Cessna 172 Skyhawk made aviation history stealthily when it landed at a small airport in Northern California, marking the completion of the first successful remotely piloted flight of a passenger plane in the United States.
The company behind this milestone in commercial aviation history is Reliable Robotics, a startup founded in 2017 by former SpaceX and Tesla engineers who previously brought autopilot to the masses of electric vehicle driving and rocket Dragon. .
The company has raised $ 33.5 million in venture financing from investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Eclipse Ventures, Pathbreaker Ventures and Teamworthy Ventures, and is now making its step to potential customers in the logistics and shipping industry.
Robert Rose, the co-founder of Reliable Robotics, comes from a flyer family. Both of these grandparents flew in World War II and had done stints as a pilot himself. Indeed, the company's origins stem from Rose's attempts to get back into the cockpit and behind the yoke.
"Flying is difficult," Rose said. "It requires a lot of cognitive skills."
But many of these cognitive abilities are tasks that Rose, with her experience designing Tesla's autopilot system and flight systems for both the Falcon and Dragon spacecraft, knew could be automated. Helping Rose automate these tasks is Juerg Frefel, the company's co-founder, vice president of engineering and former leader of the team behind the information platform for the Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft.
Reliable's systems aren't fully automated, there's still a pilot behind the scenes, but that pilot is monitoring the systems and controlling the plane remotely, rather than sitting in the cockpit.
Reliable began his experiments with retrofitting existing aircraft with autonomous systems in much the same way Tesla began his manufacturing journey by using existing chassis for aircraft rather than designing his own.
"We spent the first part of our flight test program focusing on the C172. We thoroughly tested every aspect of our system during the simulation and conducted rigorous safety checks before using the aircraft without a pilot on board and are now proud to share what we have been working on, "said Rose, in a statement.
The company started with the Cessna 172 Skyhawk, but moved on to the larger Cessna 208 Caravan. The Caravan, designed as a passenger plane, is also used by logistics companies such as FedEx for shipments. In June, the company demonstrated a completely remote landing for the Caravan on the San Jose approach route, a particularly busy route.
"There has never been a privately funded program that has ever done something like this before," Rose said.
Enabling remote piloting and automating certain aspects of flight has enormous potential to reduce costs and improve efficiency in an industry that faces multiple stresses.
"Automated aircraft will fundamentally change the entire airline business and Reliable Robotics is well positioned to be a key player in this new market," said David Neeleman, founder of several commercial airlines including JetBlue (and an investor in Reliable Robotics).
The company's autonomous platform can be applied to any fixed-wing aircraft, but Reliable's co-founder and CEO doesn't expect to sell components. Instead, Reliable Robotics will adapt and use aircraft as a service to its customers, Rose said.
"Initially, out of necessity, we will have to operate as a service," Rose said. "The certification of air systems. If you want to operate in airspace you have to certify your maintenance plan, your procedures ... the whole company has to be certified by the FAA ... If for the first time someone operates an unmanned aircraft on board, the entire company will need to be certified. At least for the first few years, we see this being handled as a service. "
Reliable conducted its first retrofit and flight in a FedEx-owned Cessna Caravan, which operates about 235 aircraft in its fleet, according to Rose. Several other shipping companies also use the Caravan for air logistics.
"There is a communication component, a ground network, a control center for the operation of the thing. It's a fully vertically integrated enterprise, "said Rose." Integrated hardware that allows us to control flight systems and get telemetry and data [and that's] integrated into a custom computer that can process this and pilot the aircraft and integrated into a ground network so that a pilot in our control center can supervise the aircraft's operations. "
Rose said the introduction to customers is increasing the use of pilots. "How could the economy change if [pilots] Could it teleport from plane to plane after they're done flying? "Rose said." Our system allows you to use the pilot more efficiently and to use the aircraft more efficiently. "
