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OPERATIONS

30 | Flight International | 22 August-4 September 2017

S

ometime next year Mike Sinnett,

Boeing’s vice-president of product

development, will enter a small,

experimental aircraft and – he hopes

• do nothing.
  Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) has
  started exploring autonomous flight technol-
  ogy for passenger-carrying aircraft and Sin-
  nett, as a pilot and engineer, plans to fly in –
  as opposed to “fly” – the first test subject.

Boeing’s newly developed, machine-

learning software is already loaded into a

flight simulator, which Sinnett and his team

have been using to refine the algorithms. But

the real test will come next year when flights

begin with Sinnett on board, as the software

makes decisions that respond to changes in

the environment.

“I’m not ready to talk yet about what those

decisions are,” Sinnett told journalists earli-

er this summer. “And I’m not going to close

the loop on the airplane. But I’m going to

make sure the decision is made with the

same set of inputs that pilots use to make de-

cisions and I’ll record the decision that the

airplane makes.”

STARTING SMALL

Boeing has not publicly identified the aircraft

Sinnett will use next year, except to describe

it as small and far less complex than a com-

mercial transport. But the size and complexi-

ty of the test aircraft will escalate several lev-

els in 2019, as Boeing re-introduces a 787 into

STEPHEN TRIMBLE WASHINGTON DC

Boeing

Flight crew

not included

Boeing’s next clean-sheet airliner probably won’t feature a fully autonomous flightdeck,

but it is exploring the technologies that may, eventually, end the days of human pilots

An ecoDemonstrator 787 is

being readied to test systems

for autonomous taxi and take-off