GoKawiilOver 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."
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