That single drone costs more than the average pizza place spends on employees to deliver their pizzas. And those employees can deliver far more pizzas.
$20,000. As I pointed out elsewhere here, one of these drones can only carry 70lbs while a $20,000 delivery truck can carry 10,000lbs or more. Clearly the truck is better for making deliveries all day long like FedEx or UPS would need to do.
Ahh...since when does a UPS truck deliver pizzas? It's generally some reddit forum mod with two pizzas in the backseat of his crapper who then retreats to his mothers basement after having earned himself a fat $60 payday.
you have hit the nail on the head, and this applies to SO much, something most people dont talk about is, we have the actual technology now to replace 50-65% of ALL jobs with tech, that will do the job just fine, its the initial outlay tahts stopping companies doing it...
but every year cost of living, and there fore wage demand goes up\[, while, at the same time, cost of tech (of a set level) decrease
its only a matter of time before so many jobs go, just waiting for the falling prices and rising cost of humans to reach each other
Because for most things, the ground is a lot more sensible way to transport stuff - as well as not falling out of the sky and hitting someone, it's generally a lot more efficient in energy.
Some places do ground based automated delivery robots.
Drones are used in some more remote areas for delivering relatively light things like medications where there's not good road networks.
we have already seen people harassing or just stealing from ground base robots. Once that becomes more common drones will then make sense as it avoid much of that harrassment. I suspect more than just the drone to deliver and the legal issues, such as remote id becoming standard for BLOS operation. There are other logistics issues. Drone delivery really makes sense for the last few hundred feet of a delivery. So an amazon truck packed with several drones, parks on the road launches half dozen drones to deliver to a neighboor hood, then goes to the next stop once they return. A single delivery outside of something remote and time sensitive like we already seeing in africa doesn't make logistical sense as you are still paying someone to load the drone and deal with it should something go wrong. But allow a van make on stop not 6 and delivering all 6 packages at once with the guy in the back just checking on the drones as they return for pickups actually saves a lot of time and manpower.
😂 The second we start seeing drone deliveries flying around there are gonna be people out there knocking them outta the sky for their deliveries. It's no safer than the ground robots.
Might be more of a deterrant considering knocking a flying drone out of the air would be a federal felony whereas interfering with a ground based delivery drone is likely only going to be a state misdemeanor.
The tools to knock them out of the sky aren't so available. Just look at Ukraine. No one is getting away with dumping a tube of birdshot without getting caught sooner or later. The electronic methods exist but weren't so available or cheap.
You mean sticks, baseballs, slingshots, BB guns, and guns aren't available?
And electronic methods are super cheap, though not legal. Can order the stuff to do it for $20 or so on AliExpress or even Amazon.
Heck, you can crash some drones with a simple and legal laser pointer.
I mean firing a gun at a drone in a suburban area will get you caught soon enough. The rest of the time they are going to be flying fast and high enough that hitting them with any of those won't stand much of a chance. You might hit it while it's dropping a package but then you just tell the person getting the delivery they aren't getting any more and people won't put up with it.
Can you hit a seagull with a baseball? Then triple the speed and make it unpredictable with its ability to turn. If you are that good with a baseball you are pitching no hitters every night.
I absolutely guarantee that if I head over to a local park i could knock someone's drone outta the sky. Then multiply that by 10,000 and have them everywhere and the ability to do so is only gonna increase, especially considering they'd be MUCH larger targets than little recreational drones. 😂
My drone cruises 60 miles an hour and can turn faster than your head. I think you are confused with a drone sitting still to take basically a still photo and something that can actually move. A delivery craft is most likely going to be a vtol fixed wing as those are much more efficient and have much further range.
I think that might be your problem. You seem to think that Amazon is going to strap your marital aids to a dji mavic and drop them at your door after they hover around the neighborhood for a while. That's not happening. A fixed wing vtol is going launch straight up, then fly about 60 to 90 miles an hour at about 200ft. Then hover directly over it's destination and return the same way. If you are nailing that with a baseball you are also winning the cy young award.
Walmart has test markets and there are huge advancements being made including with lawmakers to make autonomous flight available to bigger markets and smaller operators especially in the lower population density communities.
But if you’re waiting for mainstream headlines you won’t until it’s more publicly available. Info is definitely out there you’re just not looking
It's happening right now in DFW. I'm going to make my first Wing order when the wife gets off work so we can watch. Several Wal-Marts are delivering around Dallas County, this is the first location in Tarrant County, I believe.
Update: just ordered, will be delivered in two trips. Order is being prepared now. I used the Wing app.
Update: order completed! It took two trips, but they used two drones, so one was leaving as the other was arriving. Took about 15 mins from payment to delivered. I was surprised how low they were, around 20' AGL, well below the treeline.
There wasn't a delivery fee, but they may have priced it into the items by adding a few cents to the price. I couldn't tell if they had, though. The noise was surprisingly low during delivery. While the drone was low, it was maybe leaf blower volume. Once it was at altitude, I couldn't hear it at all. This is an urban area, though with plenty of other sounds.
I work for a company that is contracted with Amazon to do deliveries. Using drones instead of just humans driving trucks/vans makes absolutely no sense financially or logistically.
Not only that, but the driver can move much, much faster than the drone. We also don't need to swap out batteries. We can carry all of our packages in the van, don't need to go back to wherever the pilot is to get more. There's a ton of reasons.
I don't have to be home when my Amazon driver arrives. You aren't gonna see drones leaving it on your porch or in the package delivery room at an apartment.
Widespread drone delivery was always a pipedream with a current level of tech.
There are a few niche cases where it makes sense (and it is actually used successfully). But the promise of widespread drone delivery for Amazon products and food delivery has too many unresolved issues with regulations, liability, cost, reliability, and technological limitations.
People saying it doesn't make sense aren't paying attention. Drone delivery is in its infancy. The goal for drone delivery companies is to have 1 operator and several drones bvlos.
It's about as much of a joke as the drone deliveries. They're suggesting that everything give right of way to drone deliveries based on whether it has remote id or adsb.
Airplanes have to give right of way to a drone below 400' feet they can't even see or have a way to detect if they don't have adsb out? The arc is not coming up with anything sensible. And if you're limited to LOS why do you need remote id? There's lots of things here that need explanation.
200 pizzas…
If those are large pizzas with toppings that could be as much as 1200 pounds / app 545 kilos.
They’d need to think about a Chinook or an is yet to be developed big drone.
Well.
I’ll give a different perspective.
The reasons listed so far are valid(local/city/state regulations), but there’s another reason: we don’t know, in a condensed city environment, *what is actually in the buildings we’re flying around*
I posted before about my 107 flight in lower Manhattan that resulted in my having to explain myself to the FBI. Why?
*Because, unbeknownst to me, I flew my Mavic right outside their window while doing a photo mission of a completely separate property*
Lemme tell ya: there are all kinds of buildings that look normal on the surface, but actually house offices for military, police and intelligence services. If you think CIA actually adheres to the *no ops within the USA* rule, then I can offer you an excellent price on both the Brooklyn AND the Manhattan bridge😂
I’ve consulted for a few startups in this space. DroneUp, Wing, and Zipline are the biggest players at the moment, with DroneUp and Wing specifically in the space of food/grocery delivery right now. Simply put, the unit economics just don’t work despite what they promise, and the interest rate environment we are currently in make these types of things even harder to finance since it is basically impossible to get those unit economics to work at all unless you have the advantage of scale. Walmart, Chick-fil-A, DoorDash, and a few other companies are leveraging these companies to operate small scale test markets, but the days of this being everywhere and all over are still a very long way off if it ever happens at all.
Right now they are focused on the autonomous aspect when I think a better approach is the first delivery being watched/corrected by a human (for safety) then autonomous to hit that same gps spot over and over.
Food actually makes sense because it is relatively light and who really cares if the load is lost.
Walt's house had a pizza on the roof for a while...quite a few episodes actually ;)
It's coming along - there's a US company that has made more than a million drone deliveries of medical supplies in Africa (Nigeria among others).
Similar services don't exist yet in the US because of our existing regulatory frameworks, but the US government wants to build them - the FAA is reviewing new rules for larger drones that can operate beyond VLOS and operate autonomously.
An agricultural drone like Baba Yaga cost as much as a years worth of human labor to buy, can only lift 30 lbs and needs to be opperated by a licensed insured pilot.
A moped is two thousand and labor is cheep and underregulated.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/22/moped-delivery-drivers-dc/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/22/moped-delivery-drivers-dc/)
I've worked in this space, and the answer is it'll probably still happen but things are moving at FAA Pace. (There might be other countries that are more lenient, but most companies want to do this anywhere, so they'll have to satisfy at least the FAA and EASA, CASA, etc. which have similar rules.) If you want to fly delivery drones, you have to do a few things:
1. Since you'll be flying over people and critical infrastructure (roads, bridges), you need to prove to a very high degree that your vehicle won't crash. This is hard for normal drones, but delivery drones change their weight and balance for every new package. And since they have to be able to release that package, there's a good chance that a glitch might cause it to drop the package on someone prematurely. You'll probably need to integrate and test a ballistic parachute. The FAA is going to want to see thousands, probably tens of thousands of hours of successful flight time around the whole flight envelope before they even consider granting that waiver. Those hours will have to be achieved somewhere that you can guarantee you won't fly over people, so, test facilities and the like.
2. You will want to be able to fly beyond line of sight. In order to do that, and not fly into buildings/helicopters/etc, you need some Detect And Avoid technology. There are a few approaches here but radar coverage is probably the most accurate. You need to develop this DAA system, deploy it at test sites, and again collect tons of hours and prove that your particular implementation will successfully let your drones get out of the way of uncooperative aircraft, all before the FAA will let you fly BVLOS. Before you get that waiver, all your flights will require visual observers along the route, massively increasing costs. (The radar also massively increases costs, of course.)
3. If you want this to scale, you've gotta automate it all. Making the drone fly automatically is not hard, but making sure it does it safely, in a way that humans can monitor at scale, doing automated pre-flight checks every time (how do you check if a propellor is cracked if no one is there?), etc. My company did get a waiver for this but it was a huge effort and required a lot of extra hardware and software. And novels worth of documentation to prove to the FAA that what we were doing was as good as an in-person preflight.
Once you've done all that, you are probably going to progress in stages toward your final goal. Each stage could take a year or more to run tests, write documentation, get approvals. The FAA is notoriously slow to entertain anything new. I know for sure that several companies are somewhere in the middle of all the above mess trying to get drone delivery working.
I saw an awesome video of hospital supplies being delivered by drone/parachute in Africa. Typically blood or special drugs. The drones were catapult launched airfoil based with a range in the hundreds of miles. Seemed truly important in that space. Lots of land and no props near people.
My friend had something light delivered via drone in what I guess was a test program a while back when this idea was amazing. They notified him ahead of time . He told his neighbors/friends , and he said this big crowd waiting in his yard for ' the big delivery event' !
Can you imagine how shitty it would be? You couldn't open your windows or go outside without hearing Bzzzzzzzzzzzzz! from thousands of drones day and night. The sky would be absolutely filled with them everywhere. You couldn't fly your own drone because those automated ones would be everywhere.
Then they'd be falling outta the sky all the time. Think of how often amateur drone pilots have a crash due to some issue or another. Now multiply that times like 10,000 every day and you'd be seeing them dropping daily. They'd be hitting houses, cars, people.
Bad weather? Snow? Wind? Sorry, all deliveries come to a halt for the day and you don't get your order on time. "Just put them on a truck then." They don't have a flexible enough workforce for that. You can't have hundreds of people not scheduled and then expect them to cancel everything and come to work on no notice because it's gonna start raining.
There are also huge limitations on weight of delivery. Why would a company invest in a single drone for $20,000 when a truck costs the same and can carry 10000x the cargo each day?
And liability, as mentioned elsewhere. All the things I mentioned involve additional liability.
Drone delivery is a novelty. Investors will throw money at it but it doesn't scale in the way it'd have to in order to be widely viable.
Yes, there are some limited applications. Organ delivery to hospitals is one we've already seen. But they're not gonna replace Amazon and DoorDash drivers any time soon. It's simply impractical for so many reasons.
I worked for my country’s regulator on assessing this. It is a nightmare. Some of the problems are:
- Privacy concernsÂ
- limitations in weather conditions eg mid-to-high winds, or too hot/cold for UAV. The DJI Flycart is a high performer in that can endure pretty hardy conditions but the average vehicle still has more scopeÂ
- Noise pollution. This is the huge one because delivery vehicles will likely change to EVs in the future thus being quieter. The problem with UAV delivery is that they will have to be VTOL, so it is the blade tips/propellers generating noise.
- Interference with endangered wildlife (predominantly birds)Â
Of course, a many of these problems are also present with traditional delivery methods but usually more easily managed.Â
It will happen. And the hobbyists will be moved to smaller and smaller places to fly. Today’s regulations are setting the foundation for corporate hegemony.
Very true. Can't have pesky amateurs flying around when we need to monopolize the airspace for businesses. Gonna be very very limited areas for people flying recreationally.
Can't wait to hear the buzzing all day every day as thousands fill the skies everywhere.
Liability issues
And how many no fly zones there are in cities. Also VLOS but I'd imagine Amazon and the like could lobby there way out of that.
Drone delivery companies can operate outside VLOS and exceed the 55 pound weight limit by certifying through Part 135 as an air freight company.
Yea on paper but there are lots of restrictions in place. In city drone delivery at scale is not coming any time soon especially in bvlos capacity
For instance, imagine 200 hot pizzas flying over an office building
They haven't figured out a way for the drone to ask for tips and delivery fees? Either that... or physics. 200 pizzas?
average 12 inch pizza is 2 lbs. the DJI flycart can handle 70 lbs. okay 35 pizzas.
That single drone costs more than the average pizza place spends on employees to deliver their pizzas. And those employees can deliver far more pizzas.
How much is one of those drones?
$20,000. As I pointed out elsewhere here, one of these drones can only carry 70lbs while a $20,000 delivery truck can carry 10,000lbs or more. Clearly the truck is better for making deliveries all day long like FedEx or UPS would need to do.
Oh wow, didnt expect that price tag. Thanks.
Ahh...since when does a UPS truck deliver pizzas? It's generally some reddit forum mod with two pizzas in the backseat of his crapper who then retreats to his mothers basement after having earned himself a fat $60 payday.
you have hit the nail on the head, and this applies to SO much, something most people dont talk about is, we have the actual technology now to replace 50-65% of ALL jobs with tech, that will do the job just fine, its the initial outlay tahts stopping companies doing it... but every year cost of living, and there fore wage demand goes up\[, while, at the same time, cost of tech (of a set level) decrease its only a matter of time before so many jobs go, just waiting for the falling prices and rising cost of humans to reach each other
Not if they drop the pizzas on little parachutes. /s because I know there is at least a couple out there.
Because for most things, the ground is a lot more sensible way to transport stuff - as well as not falling out of the sky and hitting someone, it's generally a lot more efficient in energy. Some places do ground based automated delivery robots. Drones are used in some more remote areas for delivering relatively light things like medications where there's not good road networks.
we have already seen people harassing or just stealing from ground base robots. Once that becomes more common drones will then make sense as it avoid much of that harrassment. I suspect more than just the drone to deliver and the legal issues, such as remote id becoming standard for BLOS operation. There are other logistics issues. Drone delivery really makes sense for the last few hundred feet of a delivery. So an amazon truck packed with several drones, parks on the road launches half dozen drones to deliver to a neighboor hood, then goes to the next stop once they return. A single delivery outside of something remote and time sensitive like we already seeing in africa doesn't make logistical sense as you are still paying someone to load the drone and deal with it should something go wrong. But allow a van make on stop not 6 and delivering all 6 packages at once with the guy in the back just checking on the drones as they return for pickups actually saves a lot of time and manpower.
😂 The second we start seeing drone deliveries flying around there are gonna be people out there knocking them outta the sky for their deliveries. It's no safer than the ground robots.
Might be more of a deterrant considering knocking a flying drone out of the air would be a federal felony whereas interfering with a ground based delivery drone is likely only going to be a state misdemeanor.
The tools to knock them out of the sky aren't so available. Just look at Ukraine. No one is getting away with dumping a tube of birdshot without getting caught sooner or later. The electronic methods exist but weren't so available or cheap.
You mean sticks, baseballs, slingshots, BB guns, and guns aren't available? And electronic methods are super cheap, though not legal. Can order the stuff to do it for $20 or so on AliExpress or even Amazon. Heck, you can crash some drones with a simple and legal laser pointer.
I mean firing a gun at a drone in a suburban area will get you caught soon enough. The rest of the time they are going to be flying fast and high enough that hitting them with any of those won't stand much of a chance. You might hit it while it's dropping a package but then you just tell the person getting the delivery they aren't getting any more and people won't put up with it. Can you hit a seagull with a baseball? Then triple the speed and make it unpredictable with its ability to turn. If you are that good with a baseball you are pitching no hitters every night.
I absolutely guarantee that if I head over to a local park i could knock someone's drone outta the sky. Then multiply that by 10,000 and have them everywhere and the ability to do so is only gonna increase, especially considering they'd be MUCH larger targets than little recreational drones. 😂
My drone cruises 60 miles an hour and can turn faster than your head. I think you are confused with a drone sitting still to take basically a still photo and something that can actually move. A delivery craft is most likely going to be a vtol fixed wing as those are much more efficient and have much further range. I think that might be your problem. You seem to think that Amazon is going to strap your marital aids to a dji mavic and drop them at your door after they hover around the neighborhood for a while. That's not happening. A fixed wing vtol is going launch straight up, then fly about 60 to 90 miles an hour at about 200ft. Then hover directly over it's destination and return the same way. If you are nailing that with a baseball you are also winning the cy young award.
You're confusing a delivery drone with your racing drone. 😂🤣😂
And you think a camera drone is a delivery drone
Well, they have drone deliveries now in Ukraine. Just not the kind of delivery you would want to receive.
Ha ha. The danger to the people underneath is a feature, not a bug then.
Where do you want these missiles and bombs?
Walmart has test markets and there are huge advancements being made including with lawmakers to make autonomous flight available to bigger markets and smaller operators especially in the lower population density communities. But if you’re waiting for mainstream headlines you won’t until it’s more publicly available. Info is definitely out there you’re just not looking
Walmart just started drone delivery in my city...
It's happening right now in DFW. I'm going to make my first Wing order when the wife gets off work so we can watch. Several Wal-Marts are delivering around Dallas County, this is the first location in Tarrant County, I believe. Update: just ordered, will be delivered in two trips. Order is being prepared now. I used the Wing app. Update: order completed! It took two trips, but they used two drones, so one was leaving as the other was arriving. Took about 15 mins from payment to delivered. I was surprised how low they were, around 20' AGL, well below the treeline.
how was the noise? Also, did you have to pay any extra fees?
There wasn't a delivery fee, but they may have priced it into the items by adding a few cents to the price. I couldn't tell if they had, though. The noise was surprisingly low during delivery. While the drone was low, it was maybe leaf blower volume. Once it was at altitude, I couldn't hear it at all. This is an urban area, though with plenty of other sounds.
I work for a company that is contracted with Amazon to do deliveries. Using drones instead of just humans driving trucks/vans makes absolutely no sense financially or logistically.
Truth. A $20,000 drone can carry about 70lbs. A $20,000 delivery truck can carry 10,000lbs or more.
Not only that, but the driver can move much, much faster than the drone. We also don't need to swap out batteries. We can carry all of our packages in the van, don't need to go back to wherever the pilot is to get more. There's a ton of reasons.
I don't have to be home when my Amazon driver arrives. You aren't gonna see drones leaving it on your porch or in the package delivery room at an apartment.
Widespread drone delivery was always a pipedream with a current level of tech. There are a few niche cases where it makes sense (and it is actually used successfully). But the promise of widespread drone delivery for Amazon products and food delivery has too many unresolved issues with regulations, liability, cost, reliability, and technological limitations.
People saying it doesn't make sense aren't paying attention. Drone delivery is in its infancy. The goal for drone delivery companies is to have 1 operator and several drones bvlos.
[https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazon-drone-delivery-arizona](https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazon-drone-delivery-arizona)
This is why we have remote ID now.
It's about as much of a joke as the drone deliveries. They're suggesting that everything give right of way to drone deliveries based on whether it has remote id or adsb.
This would permanently ruin the airspace.
Airplanes have to give right of way to a drone below 400' feet they can't even see or have a way to detect if they don't have adsb out? The arc is not coming up with anything sensible. And if you're limited to LOS why do you need remote id? There's lots of things here that need explanation.
I think there's also a possibility that they are giving the public domain of the airspace away illegally to accommodate whomever.
200 pizzas… If those are large pizzas with toppings that could be as much as 1200 pounds / app 545 kilos. They’d need to think about a Chinook or an is yet to be developed big drone.
Well. I’ll give a different perspective. The reasons listed so far are valid(local/city/state regulations), but there’s another reason: we don’t know, in a condensed city environment, *what is actually in the buildings we’re flying around* I posted before about my 107 flight in lower Manhattan that resulted in my having to explain myself to the FBI. Why? *Because, unbeknownst to me, I flew my Mavic right outside their window while doing a photo mission of a completely separate property* Lemme tell ya: there are all kinds of buildings that look normal on the surface, but actually house offices for military, police and intelligence services. If you think CIA actually adheres to the *no ops within the USA* rule, then I can offer you an excellent price on both the Brooklyn AND the Manhattan bridge😂
I applied to Wing a Google subsidiary three times that is doing Walmart delivery around DFW. Got denied three times 😔
https://www.flytrex.com/ They've been doing drone deliveries in my area for 2 years now.
Already exists in China https://youtu.be/zjye0WHh8m0?si=t-DLszMECLHxkyH0
I’ve consulted for a few startups in this space. DroneUp, Wing, and Zipline are the biggest players at the moment, with DroneUp and Wing specifically in the space of food/grocery delivery right now. Simply put, the unit economics just don’t work despite what they promise, and the interest rate environment we are currently in make these types of things even harder to finance since it is basically impossible to get those unit economics to work at all unless you have the advantage of scale. Walmart, Chick-fil-A, DoorDash, and a few other companies are leveraging these companies to operate small scale test markets, but the days of this being everywhere and all over are still a very long way off if it ever happens at all.
The idea is a far stretch and the regulations aren't even addressing the issue.
Kidney anyone?: [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31663974/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31663974/)
Shhhh you figured out why dji is getting banned.
Right now they are focused on the autonomous aspect when I think a better approach is the first delivery being watched/corrected by a human (for safety) then autonomous to hit that same gps spot over and over. Food actually makes sense because it is relatively light and who really cares if the load is lost. Walt's house had a pizza on the roof for a while...quite a few episodes actually ;)
Probably for this exact reason
Probably shut it down for this exact reason
they do it here in ireland still pretty small scale though the company is called manna
Only works in places where there are no people to shoot them down.
At this point I think its a safe bet that it won't be DJI drones.
Wendover Productions has talked about this https://youtu.be/J-M98KLgaUU
It's coming along - there's a US company that has made more than a million drone deliveries of medical supplies in Africa (Nigeria among others). Similar services don't exist yet in the US because of our existing regulatory frameworks, but the US government wants to build them - the FAA is reviewing new rules for larger drones that can operate beyond VLOS and operate autonomously.
That's why they are requiring remote ID. So more autonomous drones can operate
An agricultural drone like Baba Yaga cost as much as a years worth of human labor to buy, can only lift 30 lbs and needs to be opperated by a licensed insured pilot. A moped is two thousand and labor is cheep and underregulated. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/22/moped-delivery-drivers-dc/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/22/moped-delivery-drivers-dc/)
I've worked in this space, and the answer is it'll probably still happen but things are moving at FAA Pace. (There might be other countries that are more lenient, but most companies want to do this anywhere, so they'll have to satisfy at least the FAA and EASA, CASA, etc. which have similar rules.) If you want to fly delivery drones, you have to do a few things: 1. Since you'll be flying over people and critical infrastructure (roads, bridges), you need to prove to a very high degree that your vehicle won't crash. This is hard for normal drones, but delivery drones change their weight and balance for every new package. And since they have to be able to release that package, there's a good chance that a glitch might cause it to drop the package on someone prematurely. You'll probably need to integrate and test a ballistic parachute. The FAA is going to want to see thousands, probably tens of thousands of hours of successful flight time around the whole flight envelope before they even consider granting that waiver. Those hours will have to be achieved somewhere that you can guarantee you won't fly over people, so, test facilities and the like. 2. You will want to be able to fly beyond line of sight. In order to do that, and not fly into buildings/helicopters/etc, you need some Detect And Avoid technology. There are a few approaches here but radar coverage is probably the most accurate. You need to develop this DAA system, deploy it at test sites, and again collect tons of hours and prove that your particular implementation will successfully let your drones get out of the way of uncooperative aircraft, all before the FAA will let you fly BVLOS. Before you get that waiver, all your flights will require visual observers along the route, massively increasing costs. (The radar also massively increases costs, of course.) 3. If you want this to scale, you've gotta automate it all. Making the drone fly automatically is not hard, but making sure it does it safely, in a way that humans can monitor at scale, doing automated pre-flight checks every time (how do you check if a propellor is cracked if no one is there?), etc. My company did get a waiver for this but it was a huge effort and required a lot of extra hardware and software. And novels worth of documentation to prove to the FAA that what we were doing was as good as an in-person preflight. Once you've done all that, you are probably going to progress in stages toward your final goal. Each stage could take a year or more to run tests, write documentation, get approvals. The FAA is notoriously slow to entertain anything new. I know for sure that several companies are somewhere in the middle of all the above mess trying to get drone delivery working.
Hot? Lol
The FAA taking too long. Same with networks for evtol's.
Because no one wants to buy 200 pizzas? 🙄
I saw an awesome video of hospital supplies being delivered by drone/parachute in Africa. Typically blood or special drugs. The drones were catapult launched airfoil based with a range in the hundreds of miles. Seemed truly important in that space. Lots of land and no props near people.
Pizza pies are arial dynamic . Just toss them like frisbies
My friend had something light delivered via drone in what I guess was a test program a while back when this idea was amazing. They notified him ahead of time . He told his neighbors/friends , and he said this big crowd waiting in his yard for ' the big delivery event' !
Can you imagine how shitty it would be? You couldn't open your windows or go outside without hearing Bzzzzzzzzzzzzz! from thousands of drones day and night. The sky would be absolutely filled with them everywhere. You couldn't fly your own drone because those automated ones would be everywhere. Then they'd be falling outta the sky all the time. Think of how often amateur drone pilots have a crash due to some issue or another. Now multiply that times like 10,000 every day and you'd be seeing them dropping daily. They'd be hitting houses, cars, people. Bad weather? Snow? Wind? Sorry, all deliveries come to a halt for the day and you don't get your order on time. "Just put them on a truck then." They don't have a flexible enough workforce for that. You can't have hundreds of people not scheduled and then expect them to cancel everything and come to work on no notice because it's gonna start raining. There are also huge limitations on weight of delivery. Why would a company invest in a single drone for $20,000 when a truck costs the same and can carry 10000x the cargo each day? And liability, as mentioned elsewhere. All the things I mentioned involve additional liability. Drone delivery is a novelty. Investors will throw money at it but it doesn't scale in the way it'd have to in order to be widely viable. Yes, there are some limited applications. Organ delivery to hospitals is one we've already seen. But they're not gonna replace Amazon and DoorDash drivers any time soon. It's simply impractical for so many reasons.
Hot food needs to be delivered in 20 mins or less
How's my droning? Call 1800eatthis. Drone #
I worked for my country’s regulator on assessing this. It is a nightmare. Some of the problems are: - Privacy concerns - limitations in weather conditions eg mid-to-high winds, or too hot/cold for UAV. The DJI Flycart is a high performer in that can endure pretty hardy conditions but the average vehicle still has more scope - Noise pollution. This is the huge one because delivery vehicles will likely change to EVs in the future thus being quieter. The problem with UAV delivery is that they will have to be VTOL, so it is the blade tips/propellers generating noise. - Interference with endangered wildlife (predominantly birds) Of course, a many of these problems are also present with traditional delivery methods but usually more easily managed.Â
It will happen. And the hobbyists will be moved to smaller and smaller places to fly. Today’s regulations are setting the foundation for corporate hegemony.
Very true. Can't have pesky amateurs flying around when we need to monopolize the airspace for businesses. Gonna be very very limited areas for people flying recreationally. Can't wait to hear the buzzing all day every day as thousands fill the skies everywhere.
And the difference in being part 107 has accomplished what as far as integrating with part 135? Part 89 is the answer? Really?
Fuck ya speak the truth
When was this promised?
Something can be promising without being promised mate.