Autonomous aircraft: Pilot-free crop dusters lead the way - BBC News BBC Homepage Skip to content Accessibility Help Your account Home News Sport Earth Reel Worklife Travel Culture Future Music TV Weather Sounds More menu More menu Search BBC Home News Sport Earth Reel Worklife Travel Culture Future Music TV Weather Sounds Close menu BBC News Menu Home Climate World UK Business Tech Science Entertainment & Arts Health In Pictures More BBC Verify Newsbeat Will self-flying planes transform the skies? Image source, Pyka Image caption, Pyka's crop dusters are used in the US and Brazil By Zoe Corbyn Technology Reporter , Reporting from San Francisco Published 2 September 2026 Over an alfalfa field in California's San Joaquin Valley, a small crop-spraying plane is flying scarily low to the ground. There's little risk to humans though, as the plane is pilot-free. "We can actually go lower than a human pilot can," says Russ Marotzke, as the aircraft skims over the crop. Flying lower means less spray drift and therefore less chemicals are needed than in conventional manned crop-dusting, he says. The pilotless plane belongs to Pyka, where Marotzke works as a flight test engineer. Based in a converted Second World War hangar overlooking San Francisco Bay, the start-up makes self-flying aircraft without cockpits, designed either to spray crops or deliver cargo. It is among a small group of companies racing to bring autonomous fixed-wing aircraft into commercial service. Flying urban air taxis, so called electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, have captured much of the attention around autonomous aviation. But a quieter race is also under way to deploy self-flying planes, first for jobs like crop spraying and cargo delivery – and eventually, many of their makers hope, carrying passengers too. "A fully scaled, ubiquitous passenger operation is the holy grail," says Michael Norcia, Pyka's co-founder and CEO, who envisions a large fleet of minibus-capacity Pyka