
Cessna makes history by taking off and landing with no one aboard. Here’s how - ablekh
https://fortune.com/2020/08/26/space-x-tesla-reliable-robotics-autonomous-airplanes
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api_or_ipa
I'm highly skeptical of this ever taking flight (heh).

    
    
      He says this will enable a single pilot to conduct many more cargo flights per day than is currently possible, significantly reducing costs for air freight carriers. “Today, with the concept of operations and the patterns in which they fly the aircraft, the pilot is grossly underutilized,” he says.
    

I'm not aware of any significant cargo flights using C-172 aircraft because
they're just too small to be economical. There is cargo flown with larger
C-208 aircraft, but at that point, the cost of the pilot is a small fraction
of the cost of operating the aircraft. Think about it: the pilot is only going
to cost you a few hundred dollars a day in wages, whereas a 208 costs at least
$500/hour to operate[0]. Pilot wages aren't the limiting factor holding back
thousands of these micro-cargo planes from operating, it's the economics of
operating an aircraft. Finally, there's an old adage about flying that's
particularly pertinent: "being an airline pilot is 99% boredom followed by 1%
of sheer terror." When everything is going smoothly, flying an aircraft is
_easy_. When thing's don't go well, well, that's when you need a pilot.

0:
[https://www.aircraftcostcalculator.com/AircraftOperatingCost...](https://www.aircraftcostcalculator.com/AircraftOperatingCosts/3/Cessna+208+Caravan#:~:text=Based%20on%20450%20annual%20owner,down%20to%20%24896.93%20per%20hour).

