Somehow I missed this when it came out in December, but NASA is running a competition for low-cost, energy-efficient autonomously-pilot passenger vehicles, which would take off and land from small "pocket airports" in neighborhoods. NASA is hoping for a winner of the autonomous challenge by 2015.
Gizmag has the whole story. Excerpt:
NASA’s Green Flight Challenge that is offering US$1.6 million in production funds to the winning design for a for low-cost, quiet, short take-off personal aircraft, that require little if any fossil fuel. The competition, to be decided next July, is being run by NASA’s light-aircraft partner CAFE (Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency), which envisions the resulting Suburban Air Vehicles (SAVs) taking off and landing at small neighborhood “pocket airports.”
Comments
Last year, I was flying into Denver for a plane change, and the pilot came on and said, the weather was too bad to land by manual and was near borderline for auto-land, and we landed on auto... didnt see the runway till we flared.
taking the pilot out of the cockpit is almost here for airlines too, pilots will just become a flight engineers.