The aircraft are already here. Pilot unions are preparing for battle. And the FAA is playing it cool. Autonomous flight is coming to civil aviation sooner than anyone thinks, and it may prove to be a surprising boon for flyover country.
In January, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun revealed an open secret in the world of aviation. “I think the future of autonomy is real for civil,” he told Bloomberg TV, before quickly offering some qualifiers. “It’s going to take time. Everyone’s got to build confidence. We need a certification process that we all have faith and believe in.”
The U.S. military has been flying autonomous planes for decades, of course, but always in a segregated airspace. Now it’s becoming increasingly clear that self-flying planes are coming to commercial aviation, and not in some distant Jetsons future world. Aircraft manufacturers are working toward it. Airlines are eager for it. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is preparing for it. And pilot unions acknowledge the threat is looming on the horizon.
A decade ago, the conversation was largely speculative. But today, many in the aviation industry believe that small, self-flying planes could be carrying passengers by the end of this decade. Then, barring no major safety incidents, it could take as little as another decade before larger passenger jets operate without a pilot on the flight deck.
“It’s all about money,” says Dennis Tajer, a pilot for 35 years and the spokesman for Allied Pilots Association, which represents 15,000 American Airlines pilots. “Manufacturers are looking for the next innovative technology to deploy so that they can sell it and make money, and airlines are looking at how they can do this more cheaply.”
It’s a charge that’s difficult to rebut. Six years ago, a report from the Swiss bank UBS estimated that autonomous planes could save the air transportation industry more than $35 billion per year. Still, the same report flagged a bright red public perception problem.
A 2017 global survey found that a majority of people would be unwilling to fly in a plane without a pilot, even if the airfare were cheaper. The next year, a public survey from Ipsos found that 81% of Americans would not be comfortable traveling on a self-flying plane. Notably, that survey was sponsored by the Air Lines Pilots Association (ALPA), whose 65,000 members make up the largest pilot union in the country.
The introduction of autonomous aircraft into the civil aviation mix will begin with small cargo planes, led by companies like Xwing, a Northern California-based startup. “We took an existing Cessna airframe,” says Xwing CEO Marc Piette, “which is the most widely used express cargo airframe, and we’ve been modifying that vehicle to convert it to a remotely-supervised vehicle. We think the cargo market is the best first place to deploy this. And we’ve been very deliberate.”
For the past few years, Xwing has been running automated test missions, mainly in California. A flight plan is submitted, just as if there were a human pilot, and the flight’s parameters are pre-programmed before takeoff. “It’s really a one-click thing,” Piette says. “You engage the system and it runs its mission.”
Until the technology is certified by the FAA, however, there will need to be a safety pilot on board. This allows Xwing to fly without jumping through regulatory hoops. “The safety pilot can disconnect a system and revert the aircraft to manual flying, but otherwise doesn’t do anything but monitor the system. It’s a very boring job,” Piette explains. Meanwhile, the Cessna is operated from the ground, with one human controller watching a moving map on a screen and interfacing with air traffic control.
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Useful Tips To Hone Your Article Marketing Strategy
Is article marketing a mystery to you, yet you feel it could be beneficial to your business? Are you seeking a greater presence on the internet? If you need more information about article marketing to get a better idea of how to put it to use for your business, these tips could be a great starting point.
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Do your keyword research. If you have already written an article, but aren’t sure what to title it, look for commonly searched keywords that will fit the article. Do not use keywords that don’t match up. No one likes to be looking for fishing gear and click on an article about the most recent music videos.
In order to have success when marketing an article you must be unique in your marketing approach. People do not want to see the same article written five different ways. It is very boring and unappealing to see regurgitated material. Creating new and interesting material that is written in a delightful and attracting manner is the best way to market an article.
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Have a team of editors to review articles before they are produced can provide valuable insight that could not have come from a solitary person. A team can enable many different advantages to article marketing. Articles can be produced faster and have a great variety of content for the readers.
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You may feel that in order to get the exposure for your writings that you need to pay for a submission service in order to reach the goals laid out in your article marketing plan. These services save you a lot of effort by automatically submitting your articles to thousands of directories. Using these services will cost you, however, so be sure that distribution will benefit your business before joining.
When you produce an article to promote one of your affiliate products, make the product’s best benefit the opening of your article. Kicking your article off with a bang is the best way to hook readers quickly and hustle them along the path to becoming customers. For a product with multiple benefits, see if previous customers will tell you which one they consider most impressive.
Always make your content unique. Don’t base your writing off articles written by others or copy articles and only change a few words. Articles that are 100 percent original stand out, both to readers and to search engines. If you are writing on a topic that is well-covered, add a twist or a new way of looking at it to keep it unique.
When you are marketing your articles, one tip you must remember is to create a catchy title. Don’t get so caught up in writing the content that you forget just how important your title is to draw people in and catch their attention. The title is the first thing people see, so it is important to make it as attention grabbing as possible to get the most people to actually look at your work.
Using unique content is one successful article marketing technique. The Internet is a big place with a lot of competition. One way to stand out of the crowd is to offer information that is hard to find or not commonly shared. Common topics are used by thousands of sites so offer something no one else offers.
There are several ways you can benefit from article marketing, and it provides a low cost that ensures you can enjoy full use of the practice. Building a greater presence in your community could rely on your ability to get into article marketing and work it for your business. With these tips at your disposal, you could enter into a great practice that can build quite a reputation and persona for you.
