No Pilots. Few Air Traffic Controllers. What Could Go Wrong?

US transportation secretary Sean Duffy posted a video on X with the words “GAME CHANGER.” “Introducing ‘SMART’—the new air traffic management tool that saves YOU time, cuts back DELAYS, and makes your flying experience BETTER,” he wrote. This was a new AI-infused air traffic control system. Almost three weeks later, that post would get a new life, as a nervous joke, as the FAA issued a national groundstop on Friday the 13th that instantly threw the world’s airline schedules into chaos.

The Details

The administration quickly announced that there was no evidence of a cyberattack, and no sign that SMART had anything to do with the communications failure at the heart of the government’s decision to suspend flights. But when asked on Friday night whether he could definitively rule out AI failure, Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin could only say, “There’s nothing certain right now.”

New systems like SMART are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the AI aviation revolution currently underway. Take, for instance, the Cessna Caravan that took off from Buchanan Field Airport in Concord, California, and flew south to Phoenix on a calm September morning. The plane, a single-engine turboprop, then turned east to Fort Worth, stopped at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, and finally arrived at Dare County Regional Airport off the coast of North Carolina. The zigzag, coast-to-coast trip covered 3,200 miles; along the way, the aircraft navigated busy airspace and maneuvered to avoid storms.

None of this would be remarkable, save for one fact: The entire journey took place without a single human hand touching the plane’s controls.

According to Joby Aviation, the company that carried out the project, a safety pilot was aboard the Cessna at all times—but never needed to intervene. The pilotless trip marked a major milestone in aviation. The air travel industry has long been technologically conservative, and with good reason: When human lives are at stake, it’s better to be time-tested and a little dated than cutting-edge and unpredictable.

But AI is making inroads into aviation with unprecedented speed. The effects now are hard to see, but the changes in the offing are huge, promising to remake the economics of air travel and transform how people and things move around in the sky. A big question remains, though: Can we trust this technology to be reliable and safe?

Depends who you ask. “We're introducing all this new technology to improve the system, and it's going to be a disaster,” says a recently retired FAA employee. “This is literally a Pandora's box that we are going to regret.”

Aviation’s embrace of

AI traces back to the early 2000s, when advances in batteries and microelectronics suddenly made drones much more capable and inexpensive. The surge convinced officials that robots and humans would eventually need to share the airways, and that new infrastructure would be necessary to allow that. At the time, virtually all aircraft were human-piloted, and there was no way for drones to avoid human-flown planes or each other.

In 2007, the federal government rolled out a sweeping project called Next Generation Air Transportation System—NextGen, for short—that mandated broad changes to the air travel system over the decades to come. Among its provisions was the requirement that, by 2020, aircraft in the United States be equipped with ADS-B, a system that constantly sends radio signals telling everyone in the vicinity where you are and where you’re headed.

Joby’s aircraft flying past Lower Manhattan, New York, in April.

Courtesy of Joby Aviation

With a road map to robot-friendly skies in place, big players like Amazon and Walmart began working on ambitious plans for drone delivery services. In 2014, Google unveiled Project Wing, a drone delivery offering that by 2018 was ferrying food, coffee, and medication to 164 homes near Canberra, Australia. The next year, the pilot program was expanded to Christiansburg, Virginia. Costs were high and service slow, but those early programs weren’t meant to become viable businesses. Instead, they were providing Google with operational experience for the years to come.

Around the same time, a host of startups began working on a related kind of vehicle: electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, or eVTOLs, also known as electric air taxis. These are, essentially, oversized drones (with room for pilots, for now) designed to carry a small number of people a short distance. By 2022 there were 600 different models under development.

Soon, their manufacturers promised, cheap, short aerial hops would be commonplace. Joby was among those leading the charge: In 2020, the company unveiled the design of its S4 model, which it said would be able to carry a pilot and four passengers 100 miles or more at speeds of up to 200 mph. The S4’s maiden flight took place last year.

A commercial launch seemed just around the corner. But deadlines kept getting pushed back. As it turned out, engineering a flying autonomous robot was just part of the overall problem. You also needed to design an airspace that they could operate in, train humans to pilot or supervise them, develop an economic framework within which they could earn money, and so on. “It's a very important, safe, careful dance,” says Bowles.

Silicon Valley’s speed has long been in conflict with air travel norms. “Aviation regulation has been conservative and prioritizes reliability, because the consequences of failure are severe,” says Mary Schiavo, an aviation lawyer and former inspector general in the Department of Transportation. “Certification standards and airworthiness require proof and demonstrated safety, and that usually means incremental rather than radical change.” The FAA was in no rush to let unproven robots go careening around the national airspace.

AI faced another kind of resistance in Europe. In 2017, aircraft manufacturers Airbus and Dassault asked the EASA, the European Union’s version of the FAA, to consider allowing airliners to operate with a single pilot in the cockpit. Traditionally, airliners require multiple pilots to divide the considerable workload of flying a plane and to ensure that if one pilot becomes incapacitated, the other can carry on. In Airbus’ vision, automated systems would shoulder the copilot’s workload and even take over entirely if needed.

That idea horrified pilots. The European Cockpit Association, a union of airline pilots, lodged a strong protest. Such a move “would remove an independent safety professional from the flight deck and give operators greater influence over the safety judgments that a pilot would otherwise make,” the union explained to me in an email. Last year, EASA shelved the plan.

Nevertheless, AI pressed onward. In 2023, the FAA began issuing waivers to allow delivery-drone flights beyond the visual range of operators; by the end of this year it could make the rule change permanent. Some of the biggest players are already pushing ahead aggressively. This past August, Amazon announced that it planned to expand its drone delivery service to 500 locations across the country by the end of the year. Walmart is planning drone delivery from 270 store locations by the end of 2027.

The ultimate goal is far larger. Industry insiders say that in a maximal vision of the technology’s build-out, hundreds of thousands of drones will be servicing most or all of the US population. “In five to 10 years, it’s going to be completely ubiquitous,” Anthony Vittone, chief operating officer of the drone technology company DroneUp, told me in a story for Sherwood News last year. “People are going to be, like, ‘I don’t know how I lived without it.’”

Joby and other eVTOL companies haven’t progressed quite as fast, but they, too, are moving ahead. In April, Joby flew the first-ever point-to-point eVTOL flight within N