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Pilot-free crop-spraying aircraft move toward commercial use
Pyka says its fully electric planes can fly about 35 minutes and carry up to 300 liters of spray, with software that plans routes around mapped obstacles like power lines.
BBC Business highlights the push to commercialize autonomous, fixed-wing aircraft, using pilot-free crop-spraying planes as an early proving ground. At a test site in California’s San Joaquin Valley, a Pyka aircraft flies low over an alfalfa field, with engineers running software updates and monitoring performance.
The outlet reports that Pyka’s approach aims to reduce chemical drift by allowing the aircraft to fly lower than manned crop-dusting, which can lower the amount of spray needed. Pyka’s planes, built with no cockpit, are fully electric and use batteries in the nose, with onboard software planning spray routes based on mapped obstacles.
BBC Business also notes that Pyka has around a dozen aircraft operating in Brazil, where they spray crops including cotton and soybeans and take over work previously done by human pilots. The aircraft carries up to 300 liters of spray and can land itself when it senses it is running low on spray, with the refilling done manually afterward.
Pyka’s executives say the longer-term ambition extends beyond agriculture and cargo delivery, with the company envisioning larger fleets of passenger-carrying aircraft for later stages. BBC Business frames the effort as a parallel race to the better-known urban eVTOL focus, targeting self-flying planes first for commercial tasks like spraying and delivery.
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