Airbus said it has developed technology to fly passengers jets with no pilots at all.
Its Chief Commercial Officer, Christian Scherer, said that the barriers which remain are human: convincing regulators and passengers to accept the planes.
“This is not a matter of technology – it’s a matter of interaction with the regulators, the perception in the traveling public,” Scherer told The Associated Press.
Trust in the airline industry remains low after two Boeing 737 Max 8 craft crashed within five months of each other, killing all 346 people onboard.
Scherer said the crashes “highlighted and underlined the need for absolute, uncompromising safety in this industry.”
Airbus has developed technology to fly passenger jets with no pilots, and is ready to deploy it today, according to one of its top executives.
But the company knows that autonomous commercial flight remains a distant prospect because of barriers which are human, rather than technical.
Christian Scherer, Airbus’s chief commercial officer, told The Associated Press (AP) about the autonomous technology at the Paris Air Show on Monday.
He said: “This is not a matter of technology – it’s a matter of interaction with the regulators, the perception in the traveling public.”
“When can we introduce it in large commercial aircraft? That is a matter we are discussing with regulators and customers, but technology-wise, we don’t see a hurdle.”
No commercial airline offers autonomous commercial flights at the moment, and national regulators are yet to draw up rules for how they should be monitored and operated.
All commercial aircraft are currently flown by human pilots, albeit with a lot of automation. The majority of the legwork of flight, including some automatic landings, is done by in-flight computers – called “fly by wire.”
Bob Mann, founder of airline consulting firm R.W. Mann & Co. told Business Insider in 2015 that automated planes “won’t happen in my lifetime.” He said the reason for this was because autonomous planes would be a nightmare to insure.
A second barrier, cited by pilots, is that automatic technology can malfunction.
