Ontario innovator on mission to prove planes don't need pilots in cockpit

Jeremy Wang is working to prove planes no longer need someone in the cockpit to fly them.

The 28-year-old first started working on small drones with a friend from university, before taking things to new heights.

“We kind of said to ourselves, ‘Okay, small drones are great, but if you really want to have a substantial impact on transportation at scale, we know it’s going to take full-sized aircraft,’” Wang told CTV News Toronto.

“That started to cut down the path of thinking, ‘How can we make full-sized aircraft fully autonomous?’”

He and Carl Pigeon bought a two-seater plane together using their savings back in 2020, and their Toronto-based start-up company Ribbit began to take off.

The goal was to first transport goods to areas across northern Canada that can only be reached to by aircraft, as Wang says these communities can suffer “pretty severe consequences from a supply chain perspective” if a flight can’t make it in.

After receiving approvals from Transport Canada, Wang said they started running flight tests out of a hangar in Burlington – and so far they have logged 180 hours of successful flights.

The first hands-free, gate-to-fate flight happened back in 2021, and while fully-autonomous, a human safety pilot was still on board.

“Our plane taxied out from the hangar, went to the runway, took off, flew around, landed and went back to the hangar, and the safety pilot did nothing but sit in the cockpit,” Wang said in a statement.

So far, Ribbit has been running its tests on smaller aircraft as opposed to massive planes.

“The way to think about it is, in the same way you look at the self-driving car industry, a lot of the start-ups in the companies there tend to be retrofitting or modifying shuttles and taxis to perform autonomous service, as opposed to retrofitting a city bus,” Wang explained.

“The reason is that when you retrofit smaller systems, you can offer better service levels.”

By better service, Wang means more flights can take off per day from a larger variety of airports across the country.

“Instead, the planes we’re focusing on, you’d be able to fly in and out of a private airport,” Wang said. “The vast majority of air traffic goes through, I think, a couple hundred airports – basically the big ones everybody thinks of – but [there’s] actually 15,000 airports all across the country, most of which are underutilized.”

“So, if we’re able to make it more cost effective, to operate the smaller planes that can serve point-to-point destinations, we’d be able to reduce the number of layovers and stopovers and be able to serve supply and demand closer to where it’s coming from and where it’s going to.”

Wang received Mitacs Change Agent Entrepreneur Award, a total of $5,000, in recognition of his work developing Canada’s first autonomous cargo airline.

While Wang’s focused on transporting cargo, travelling passengers is on the docket – but not anytime soon.

“Maybe, you know, at least a decade or two out? It’s hard to say,” he said.

Ribbit signed letters of intent with six online retailers serving northern Canadian communities, and is currently working with Transport Canada to achieve regulatory approval to move forward with commercial fights.

By next summer, the start-up expects to fly its first truly autonomous flight next summer now that it has been approved for flight testing without a pilot on board.