Over an alfalfa field in California's San Joaquin Valley, a small crop-spraying plane is flying scarily low to the ground. There's little risk to humans though, as the plane is pilot-free. "We can actually go lower than a human pilot can," says Russ Marotzke, as the aircraft skims over the crop.
Flying lower means less spray drift and therefore less chemicals are needed than in conventional manned crop-dusting, he says. The pilotless plane belongs to Pyka, where Marotzke works as a flight test engineer. Based in a converted Second World War hangar overlooking San Francisco Bay, the start-up makes self-flying aircraft without cockpits, designed either to spray crops or deliver cargo.
It is among a small group of companies racing to bring autonomous fixed-wing aircraft into commercial service. Flying urban air taxis, so called electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, have captured much of the attention around autonomous aviation. But a quieter race is also under way to deploy self-flying planes, first for jobs like crop spraying and cargo delivery – and eventually, many of their makers hope, carrying passengers too.
"A fully scaled, ubiquitous passenger operation is the holy grail," says Michael Norcia, Pyka's co-founder and CEO, who envisions a large fleet of minibus-capacity Pyka planes ferrying passengers up and down the US east and west coasts. "There's a decent chance we'll get to that point before the eVTOL industry." I've come to one of Pyka's crop-sprayer test sites, about 80km (50 miles) east of the company's factory and reached by a bumpy dirt road. Today, Marotzke and a colleague are trying out a software update on a demonstration aircraft.
About a dozen Pyka aircraft are already in Brazil where they are used to spray crops such as cotton and soybeans, work previously carried out by human pilots. The crop-spraying plane is fully electric, with its battery in the nose. It can fly for about 35 minutes and carries up to 300L of spray in a tank in its middle.
Pyka's planes are sometimes called large drones, but it seems an understatement: they all have 11.5m wingspans. Inside a shipping container beside the field, the engineers highlight on a computer the area they want the aircraft to spray. The software then plans the route, taking account of obstacles such as nearby power lines that have already been mapped.
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