By EDDIE TRIZZINO
Times West Virginian
FAIRMONT, W.Va. — Airline company Boeing announced Thursday plans to acquire Aurora Flight Services Corp. to further develop autonomous flight technologies.
The announcement was made in a Facebook Live stream featuring officials of the two companies.
“Aurora will be joining the Boeing family. Boeing is going to be acquiring Aurora Flight Sciences as part of their new innovation initiative,” John Langford, Aurora’s CEO and founder, said in a Facebook Live stream.
“Aurora is a small business based in Virginia, Massachusetts, West Virginia and Mississippi, and we are at the forefront of this transformation first with unmanned airplanes and then the transformation of those unmanned airplanes into airplanes that can carry people but have higher and higher levels of trusted autonomy,” Langford said.
Boeing will begin utilizing Aurora’s technology as it develops and pushing to further advance the autonomous technology.
“With technology maturing so quickly, and we’ve seen airplanes — you know it’s less about the airplanes and more about the software in the airplane — and we’ve seen it in autonomous cars, so this revolution that’s happening around autonomy is gonna come into aerospace,” Greg Hyslop, chief technology officer for Boeing, said in the live stream.
The deal is not yet completed as government approvals are still needed and being completed, according to Langford.
However, planes are being flown remotely for test flights where a controller gives direction from the ground.
“Making sure that these things can navigate around obstacles on the ground and in the air is one of the real challenges that is sort of the next stage,” Langford said.
Email Eddie Trizzino at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @eddietimeswv.
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