A Self-Flying Plane Crosses the United States Without Its Pilot Touching the Controls

A small cargo plane fitted with Joby Aviation's self-flying system traveled 3,199 miles from California to North Carolina, taxiing, taking off, steering around storms and landing at every stop while the pilot on board never touched the controls. The company calls it the first fully autonomous flight across the country. Federal rules still required a pilot in the seat.

Joby Aviation, a California company best known for developing electric air taxis, announced today that one of its aircraft flew from California to North Carolina, 3,199 miles with stops along the way, without the pilot on board touching the controls once. The plane taxied, took off, flew its route, steered around bad weather and landed by itself at every stop. The company says it is the first fully autonomous flight across the continental United States.

The aircraft is not exotic. It is a Cessna Caravan, a small single-engine plane that has carried cargo and passengers to small airports for decades, fitted with cameras, radar and laser-based distance sensors, and the software that reads them. Joby bought that technology in 2024 from a company called Xwing, and has said its development includes AI and machine-learning methods, the same broad family of techniques behind self-driving cars, in which a program learns to recognize what its cameras are seeing instead of being handed a rule for every situation. The company had flown the system on more than 400 flights before this one. It has not described in detail how much of the flying is decided by a learned program and how much by conventional automation.

The trip left Concord, California, on September 7 and reached the Outer Banks of North Carolina on September 14, with stops in Phoenix, Fort Worth and at an Air Force base in South Carolina. Each leg was chosen to test something different: crowded airspace, staying clear of other aircraft, rerouting around storms. People on the ground in California and South Carolina followed the flight over a satellite link from as far as 2,323 miles away. Federal rules required a qualified pilot to sit in the cockpit the whole way, ready to take over, and the plane was flying under an experimental permit, not the approval an airline would need.

This is not about the pilot on your next vacation flight. Joby's own list of uses is narrower: cargo to remote communities, supplies after a disaster, and military missions where nobody wants to put a pilot at risk. "Autonomy has an important role to play in the future of flight," the company's chief executive, JoeBen Bevirt, said, "allowing us to connect remote communities, deliver critical supplies, respond faster to disasters, support military operations, and keep pilots out of harm's way." A plane that can fly itself, watched from an office hundreds of miles away, is now a demonstrated fact. What has not changed is the law: for now, the human still has to be there.