Cessna makes history by taking off and landing with no one aboard. Here’s how

I'm highly skeptical of this ever taking flight (heh).

  He says this will enable a single pilot to conduct many more cargo flights per day than is currently possible, significantly reducing costs for air freight carriers. “Today, with the concept of operations and the patterns in which they fly the aircraft, the pilot is grossly underutilized,” he says.

I'm not aware of any significant cargo flights using C-172 aircraft because they're just too small to be economical. There is cargo flown with larger C-208 aircraft, but at that point, the cost of the pilot is a small fraction of the cost of operating the aircraft. Think about it: the pilot is only going to cost you a few hundred dollars a day in wages, whereas a 208 costs at least $500/hour to operate[0]. Pilot wages aren't the limiting factor holding back thousands of these micro-cargo planes from operating, it's the economics of operating an aircraft. Finally, there's an old adage about flying that's particularly pertinent: "being an airline pilot is 99% boredom followed by 1% of sheer terror." When everything is going smoothly, flying an aircraft is _easy_. When thing's don't go well, well, that's when you need a pilot.

0: https://www.aircraftcostcalculator.com/AircraftOperatingCost....