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Ask HN: Is there any investment in pilotless planes?
I am referring to big commercial planes carrying passengers (or cargo), not drones.
There is so much hype on driverless cars, but I would imagine that is technologically simpler to build and deploy a pilotless plane. Comparing to a car on a road, the traffic and encounters with other vehicles are much more predictable (and avoided), terrain is much more known and permanent, and there is much more external monitoring (from the ground).
It may piloted remotely or even self-piloted by a computer.
Is there anything I am not aware of? Being it around technical challenges I did not antecipate or serious investments already happening that I don't know about?
- henningpeters 10y agoI recently met the founders of https://www.daedalean.ai https://www.daedalean.ai, it's more focused on personal aircraft than on big commercial planes though.
- gus_massa 10y agoIIRC autopilot is so good that current planes are almost pilotless, but passengers will get extremely nervous. Pilots do an exhaustive checklist before starting the flight. I'm not sure how automatable it is. (Perhaps it may work for military transport outside war zones. You can just order the soldiers to use the planes.)
- twobyfour 10y agoYou mean a drone?