Self-flying airplanes are gearing up for take-off, as Boeing, Airbus and other companies are testing autonomous systems and craft - but pilots are pushing back over safety risks. The technologies enable autonomous landings, handle-inflight emergencies and relax the Federal Aviation Administration's law requiring two pilots in the cockpit. Pilots have shared their concerns on Twitter, with many stating that two pilots are required in an emergency. Tony Driza, who has been an airline pilot for 40 years, posted that he can'equivocally state that when an emergency situation arises in the cockpit, a full crew is necessary to deal with it.' While autonomous airplanes are still early, Boeing's CEO Dave Calhoun said in a Bloomberg TV interview the technology will'come to all airplanes eventually.' Boeing has developed an autonomous refueling plane for the US Navy, the MQ-25.

Abate talks to Maxime Gariel, CTO of Xwing about the autonomous flight technology they are developing. At Xwing, they retrofit traditional aircraft to include multiple sensors such as cameras, lidar, and radar. Using sensor fusion algorithms, they create an exceptionally accurate model of the environment. This model of the environment and advanced path planning and control algorithms allow the plane to autonomously navigate in the airport, take off, fly to a destination, and land, all without a person on board. Maxime Gariel Maxime Gariel is the CTO of Xwing, a San Francisco based startup whose mission is to dramatically increase human mobility using fully autonomous aerial vehicles.

Several companies are building unmanned flying vehicles from scratch, but autonomous aviation startup Xwing is taking a different approach by focusing on software for existing aircraft. Now, the company says it's achieved a major milestone by completing the first fully autonomous gate-to-gate demonstration of a commercial cargo flight. The breakthrough saw a remotely-piloted Cessna Grand Caravan 208B utility plane (equipped with the startup's AutoFlight software stack) leave the gate, taxi, take-off, land and return to the gate by itself. Xwing says that all traffic control interactions were done remotely from the ground. The startup believes that by retrofitting existing aircraft with its autonomous system it can get to market sooner by overcoming the regulatory and technical hurdles others face.

Adam Shelly (left), an Xwing software engineer, stands with CEO and founder Marc Piette (center) and ... [ ] CTO Maxime Gariel in front of a Cessna 208B Grand Caravan the startup has retrofitted to fly autonomously. Scores of companies are working to develop pilotless robot aircraft that are electrically powered and takeoff and land vertically. That's an awful lot of change to pull off at once. Xwing is among a handful of aviation startups that are aiming to get to market sooner by taking on just one piece of that puzzle, in its case, making aircraft fly autonomously. The San Francisco-based company claims to have pulled off the first fully autonomous flight of a Cessna 208B Grand Caravan, a small workhorse cargo plane, and it's hoping to win approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to launch commercial cargo deliveries with unmanned Grand Caravans over unpopulated areas in 2022.