Will self-flying planes transform the skies?

Over an alfalfa field in California’s San Joaquin Valley, a plane is skimming along low enough to make a human pilot nervous. Nobody’s in the cockpit, because there isn’t one. The aircraft belongs to Pyka, a startup building self-flying planes for crop spraying and cargo work, and the company’s test engineer says the machine can fly lower than a person safely would, which helps cut spray drift and reduce chemical use.

Pyka is working out of a converted Second World War hangar overlooking San Francisco Bay, but its ambitions are much bigger than field testing in California. About a dozen of its aircraft are already working in Brazil, spraying cotton and soybeans. The plane itself is fully electric, carries up to 300 litres of spray, and can stay aloft for about 35 minutes. With a wingspan of 11.5 metres, it is hard to mistake for a toy drone.

The day at the test site shows how much of the work has shifted from pilot skill to software. Engineers mark the spray area on a screen, the system plots the route around mapped obstacles like power lines, and the aircraft takes off on its own. It later lands itself when it runs low on spray, gets refilled and swapped to a fresh battery, and goes back out to finish the job where it stopped.

That kind of autonomy is still a long way from the hype around flying taxis. Self-flying planes have moved more slowly than self-driving cars, in part because aviation safety standards are stricter and the consequences of failure are harsher. Military contracts have helped keep the sector alive, and commercial approvals remain narrow: Pyka’s crop sprayer is the largest autonomous fixed-wing aircraft cleared for civilian use in the US, but only in a tightly controlled agricultural setting with a ground operator and visual observer.

The industry is split on how to get to wider use. Pyka and Windracers are building aircraft from scratch. Reliable Robotics is retrofitting a Cessna 208B Grand Caravan and keeping AI out of the loop. Merlin Labs is leaning hard into AI, including plans for generative systems to talk to air traffic control. However the argument ends, the near-term prize looks less like a robot airliner and more like safer, cheaper, less annoying flying that happens without anybody in the cockpit.