The Toulouse Airbus campus is so large that it's hard not to feel a little overwhelmed.
It is a sizable facility that employs 28,000 people and welcomes hundreds of interested visitors each day.
A loading dock is home to the enormous Beluga cargo plane, which is waiting to fly cars and satellites all over the world.
The Concorde development hangar is not far from where we conduct our interviews. Concorde is a supersonic passenger aircraft.
Airbus conducts a great deal of its research and development on this site, including the recently completed Project Dragonfly, an experiment to increase the capabilities of the autopilot.
The role of the pilot has changed over the past 50 years as a result of aviation automation. Nowadays, the technology in the cockpit helps pilots a lot more.
The autonomy of the aircraft was further increased by Project Dragonfly, which was carried out on an Airbus A350-1000.
The three areas the project concentrated on were enhanced automatic landing, taxi assistance, and automated emergency diversion.
Possibly the most dramatic of those is the last.
The chance of being in an airplane accident is "vanishingly small," according to Malcolm Ridley, Chief Test Pilot of Airbus's commercial aircraft.
However, Project Dragonfly conducted tests on an automatic emergency descent system to ensure that the aircraft and crew were prepared for any situation.
The concept is that this technology would take control if the pilots needed to concentrate on making important decisions or if they were to become incapacitated.
The aircraft can descend and make an emergency landing while recognizing other aircraft, the environment, and the weather.
Using a synthetic voice produced by artificial intelligence, the system also enables radio communication between the aircraft and air traffic control.
The plane's systems have a lot to handle.
According to Miguel Mendes Dias, an expert in automated emergency operations, one of the difficulties was training the system to comprehend all the data and come up with a solution.
"The aircraft must gather all the information by itself. Therefore, it must keep an eye out for air traffic control's airport messages.
Then, he continued, "it needs to select the best airport for diversion.".
Two emergency descents by Project Dragonfly were accomplished successfully.
French air traffic controllers were fully aware of the situation during the test flights, and the plane landed without incident.
According to Mr. Mendes, it was a truly amazing feat.
Fortunately, most landings are much less dramatic, and Project Dragonfly also looked at the more common type.
Position Approach, a technology used by the majority of large airports, directs the aircraft onto the runway.
Airbus has been considering alternative landing methods because not every airport in the world has that technology.
For an automated landing, Project Dragonfly investigated the use of various sensors.
It involved combining the use of conventional cameras, infrared technology, and radar.
Additionally, the team collected data from all over the world to enable modeling of various weather conditions.
The additional sensors not only provide the aircraft with more data but also increase the pilot's visibility while watching the landing.
Since objects become warmer as you get closer to them, infrared cameras, for instance, are useful in cloudy conditions.
A computer vision engineer working on the Dragonfly project, Nuria Torres Mataboch, claims that the technology "will make the pilot comfortable in the fact that he's really aligned and on the good path to go to the runway.".
Taxiing was a subject of Project Dragonfly. Even though it might seem like a simple task, it can be the most difficult part of the job, especially at the busiest airports in the world.
The pilot was in charge of the aircraft in this instance.
The crew received audio alerts from the technology. As a result, the aircraft sounded an alert when it encountered obstacles. Additionally, it provided speed recommendations and ranaway location guidance to pilots.
Mr. Ridley stated, "We wanted something that would help and lessen the workload of the pilots during the taxi phase.
Some pilots are against pushing technology too far, so what do they make of these developments?
Tony Lucas, president of the Australian and International Pilots Association, said that no pilot would likely feel particularly at ease if a computer decided whether or not a flight successfully landed.
Business technology has become more sophisticated.
Additionally, he is not confident that self-flying aircraft will be able to handle eventual complex situations.
From his base at Sydney Airport, he declared, "Two well-trained and rested pilots on the flight deck cannot be replaced by automation in the decision-making process.
Mr. Lucas cited the Boeing 737 Max as an example, in which an automated system resulted in two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019.
Airbus is quick to point out that further automation won't be implemented until it is safe to do so and that keeping pilots in the cockpit is not the goal.
However, is it possible that someday, no pilots will be required for passenger plans?
According to Mr. Ridley, fully automated aircraft would only ever fly if doing so was unquestionably and safely the best option for protecting our passengers and crew.
BBC Click has additional coverage of this story.
