NASA - Pilotless plane flies through public airspace
 

Title should read
"Nasa - Remotely Controlled Pilotless plane flies through public airspace"

Four exorbitantly expensive graduates flew this missions from the ground. This is the culmination of years working on this project, a large bank of computer displays, uninterruptible and encoded satellite data channels. "We are very pleased with this outcome." said the spokeswoman from NASA. She went on: "Our next step is to try and save a fortune by having human beings fly these aircraft. We believe they will require less training, require less infrastructure, be more adaptive to the environment, give a smoother ride and be capable of dealing more quickly with any problems that may occur during flight. Unfortunately, we have so much money to spend on projects like this we are unable to envisage any time in the future when we can start planning for a manned flight."

PM

Joking of course or badly phrased?

Hopefully by then we'll all be telecommuting anyway, so there will be virtual passengers too.

Maybe somewhat earlier. On 16th November 2010 I attended a symposium at BAE Systems Warton entitled, Uninhabited Air Systems (UAS) for Civil Applications. This included: The ASTRAEA Programme, Civil UAS Applications, Key UAS Technologies, including: Sense and Avoid, Weather Integration, Autonomy and Decision Making, Mission Management & Certification.

Clive.

The BAE flights had a monitoring test pilot on board didn't they? This time they open regular procedures for everyday drone traffic within public airspace.

Grad students are dirt cheap. You could easily hire 4 of them for the price of 2 commercial pilots.

Its another step along the long path to on board pilot extinction. Next logical step will be single pilot and a co=pilot on the ground monitoring multiple flights. Thankfully I'll be long retired by then.

The flight being referred to wasn't one of those, but this one, which did indeed take place in 2015:

Watchkeeper Flown in UK Civil Airspace For The First Time

Good luck trying to get a monitoring pilot on board a Watchkeeper. :O

I seem to remember a pilotless aircraft crossing the Pacific 17 years ago
On 24 April 2001, a Global Hawk flew non-stop from Edwards in the US to RAAF Base Edinburgh in Australia, making history by being the first pilotless aircraft to cross the Pacific Ocean. The flight took 22 hours, and set a world record for absolute distance flown by a UAV, 13,219.86 kilometers (8,214.44 mi).[93]

I could imagine the rational for oceanic cargo flights from a remote dedicated departure airfield to a remote dedicated destination being pilotless and remotely controlled. They could have dedicated routes and levels and cause no conflict with civilian traffic.

I couldn't say better.

Btw it's not a news that I liked to read. It's clearly the beginning of the end. I hope I will retire before my Virtual Chief Pilot ask me to monitor screen N° 9 while he is going for a break ;-)

As SLF, I can see where having a system whereby the ground (or the aircraft itself) can take over in an emergency could save lives. Hijacking? Smoke in the cockpit? Decompression? I don't think a full-time system would currently be feasible (any more than it has been with automobiles), but when the choice is the computer flying the plane or the plane being totally out of control, then I'd take my chances with the computer.

My first view of this thread. Piltdown Man is da man!! :D

Because it would only be enabled when the pilots squawked an emergency code on the transponder?