Brit drone biz Sensat notches up 29km remote-control flight A Brit drone firm has made a 29km beyond visual line-of-sight (BVLOS) flight, a small but important step for fuller commercialisation of the tech. Operating under a special dispensation from the Civil Aviation Authority, Sensat flew its craft – a conventional layout small unmanned aeroplane – around its 29km course, during …
To see real innovation in this space, we need to work on enabling BVLOS flights as simply as possible. It's good to see that a single flight has been possible, but rather points out how slow progress is in this area that we've been technically able to carry out such missions for quite some time now.
We need to make it harder, not easier, for Amazon and the like to deliver low quality tat around the globe. Convenience and low cost are lovely in the short term, but all that crap has to go somewhere once the initial excitement wears off, and we've only got the one planet.
Sorry, I don't normally rant like a hippie. It's just that drones already annoy me buzzing around and fleets of them carrying plastic crap doesn't feel like a future I want to be a part of :(
@Lusty - Honestly, I never set out to be a hippie, being firmly convinced that a good support bra was one of the many benefits of civilisation. But latterly as my children and significant other seem to be getting suckered into a spiral of buy-replace-dispose for every aspect of their lives I've become one. And it feels good ...
I'm more of a eBay Hellfire man myself. Much less likely to annoy the neighbours when it gets dropped off.
@ Tom 38, and Sgt_Oddbal
You are both doing it wrong ya gotta respect the old skool tech.l
True, but that's the hobbyist world. In the profit oriented world, they have to follow certain rules (not all the time but for this, yes). Once the regulators are satisfied, then the sky can be filled with wonderful drones doing deliveries and checking on the neighborhood for law enforcement, etc. without human intervention. Need I mention that having a meatsack monitoring every flight would cost money... err... profit?
...the comments are full of people pointing out that this sort of thing is routine for aeromodellers, and has been for some time. Do you remember the Richard May autonomous glider flight to Lundy several years ago?
http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/46297/1/IJUSEng%20-%20Glider%20for%20Cross-Channel%20Flight.pdf
They did the first Channel crossing by an unmanned radio controlled aircraft in 1954, This sort of thing is no longer news, no matter how many press releases are sent out by proud project managers....
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