Tallinn Airport Runs Europe's First Driverless Airside Shuttles

Tallinn Airport's airside now moves roughly 1,000 kilometers of cargo and personnel every week with nobody behind the wheel. Auve Tech's eight-passenger MiCa shuttles, fully electric and running Level 4 autonomy, ferry Magnetic MRO's employees, tools and equipment between hangars — and since August, they do it without a single onboard safety operator.

Auve Tech says the deployment is the first authorized autonomous airport passenger transport operation in Europe to drop the onboard safety role. The company demonstrated the driverless configuration on Oct. 7, in cooperation with Magnetic MRO, Estonia's homegrown maintenance group operating from Tallinn's airside.

How does the operation work?

Each MiCa shuttle carries cameras and LiDAR sensors and follows predefined routes across the airport, supervised remotely. Under the current setup, one remote supervisor watches one vehicle. That ratio is the next constraint Auve Tech wants to break: the company is developing systems that would let a single supervisor oversee multiple shuttles at once, which is where the economics of autonomous ground operations actually change.

The numbers Auve Tech reports are worth noting: an average autonomy rate of 99.9% across the weekly 1,000 kilometers. That figure now sits inside a live commercial operation, not a test program — the collaboration between the Estonian developer and Magnetic MRO began with testing in 2023 and progressed to commercial operations in 2025.

For Magnetic MRO, the shuttles are no longer an experiment. They have become part of the maintenance provider's daily logistics, moving people and supplies between hangar facilities.

"For us, this is not about testing technology anymore. The autonomous vehicles are already part of our daily operations, supporting the continuous movement of people and supplies between our hangars," said Risto Mäeots, CEO of Magnetic Group.

What does it mean for airport ground operations?

The Tallinn deployment demonstrates that autonomous vehicles can work in complex airside environments — alongside aircraft, ground support equipment and other airport traffic. That is a harder problem than a campus or business park, and clearing it in an authorized, regulator-approved format distinguishes this operation from most autonomous-vehicle pilots in Europe.

The near-term applications Auve Tech points to are internal: employee transportation, equipment movement and internal logistics, with fewer dedicated vehicle operators on the payroll. For MRO providers, whose margins depend on turning hangar time efficiently, removing a driver from every run between buildings is a small but real cost lever — one supervisor per vehicle today, fewer per vehicle tomorrow.

What comes next?

Regulators authorized the removal of onboard safety operators in August; the October demonstration confirmed the configuration in practice. Auve Tech's next development target — multi-vehicle remote supervision — will determine how far the model scales beyond a single maintenance campus and toward broader airport ground fleets.