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Pilotless Airliners

by Mr. Flight on November 30th, 2006

In England recently an airliner was flown without a pilot in the cockpit to test technology that would turn an airliner into a UAV. The flight lasted about two hours and was designed to see if you could control a fleet of UAVs flying in a pack from one command center.

“The big burning question at the MoD is how to operate UAVs in attack missions in the future,” says Kevin Williams, project manager at Qinetiq. “We wanted to see if a fast-jet pilot, flying a Tornado perhaps, could control a pack of four UAVs in deep, target attack situations while still doing his own job.”

I’m flying commercially next week and there had better be two pilots up on the front. :)

landed via newscientisttech.com.

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