Autonomous flight developer Xwing recently operated a pilotless cargo flight with its modified Cessna Grand Caravan on behalf of US Air Force (USAF) officials.
With USAF personnel watching the 26 January flight from a ground control station, Xwing’s Superpilot system delivered “equipment requested by air force leaders” from March Air Reserve Base in Southern California to McClellan Airfield near Sacramento.
“Xwing’s autonomous flight technology allows its aircraft to taxi, take off, fly to a destination, avoid airborne and ground obstacles and land without any human input,” says the USAF.
A safety pilot was on-board during the autonomously operated flight, Xwing says.
The flight was conducted as part of the third phase of Xwing’s ongoing Small Business Innovation Research contract with the USAF’s AFWERX Prime programme. The programme boosts development of Xwing’s technology, which it says will allow autonomous aircraft – including those larger than a Grand Caravan – to safely integrate into the national airspace system.
“Demonstrating the capability in an operationally relevant environment is a technical milestone in a capability’s technical readiness, and we wanted to check that box,” says Ian Clowes, AFWERX Prime’s stakeholder engagement lead.
Xwing chief executive Marc Piette told FlightGlobal last year that the US military has expressed strong interest in the company’s autonomous flight technology, since it could spare human pilots from flying in high-risk scenarios.
“The advantage of autonomous cargo aircraft is that you can fly in places where that might be dangerous to humans,” Piette said at the time. “Being able to move supplies around without putting pilots in harm’s way is definitely of interest [to the USAF].”
USAF leaders were invited to consider the technology’s potential for contributing to the Agile Combat Employment concept, ”which is to disperse aircraft and equipment between major hub bases and smaller airfields to improve resilience and survivability”.
Since Xwing flew its first totally autonomous gate-to-gate flight in 2021, its Grand Caravan has logged 500h of autonomous flight time across 250 flights, the company says.
Competitor and fellow Bay Area start-up Reliable Robotics also flew a pilotless Caravan over a populated area of Northern California in late November 2023. The US Federal Aviation Administration observed that flight.
