"In September 2019, a Cessna 172—a four-seat, single-engine plane that is among the most common aircraft model in existence—taxied to a runway at an airport south of San Jose, took off on its own, flew for 15 minutes, and then landed at the same airport, all without a single person on board.
The aviation milestone—believed to be the first complete civilian unmanned flight over a populated area—was revealed in a video released today by Reliable Robotics, a Mountain View, Calif., startup founded by two former employees of SpaceX and Tesla that emerged from three years of "stealth" operation.
The flight, for which the Federal Aviation Administration had cleared the company back in December 2018, came several months after the August 2019 flight of a different unmanned small Cessna model, a 1968 Cessna 206, conducted by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and the technology company Dzyne Technologies. But that flight took place over the remote Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, not a populated area.
Reliable Robotics also announced that it has now installed the same autonomous-flying software on a larger single-engine Cessna 208 Caravan—which is often used for short-haul cargo deliveries and passenger flights—and, in June, landed that airplane autonomously for the first time."
The aviation milestone—believed to be the first complete civilian unmanned flight over a populated area—was revealed in a video released today by Reliable Robotics, a Mountain View, Calif., startup founded by two former employees of SpaceX and Tesla that emerged from three years of "stealth" operation.
The flight, for which the Federal Aviation Administration had cleared the company back in December 2018, came several months after the August 2019 flight of a different unmanned small Cessna model, a 1968 Cessna 206, conducted by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and the technology company Dzyne Technologies. But that flight took place over the remote Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, not a populated area.
Reliable Robotics also announced that it has now installed the same autonomous-flying software on a larger single-engine Cessna 208 Caravan—which is often used for short-haul cargo deliveries and passenger flights—and, in June, landed that airplane autonomously for the first time."