From windfarms to Amazon Prime, UK plans to long range test six drone services The UK's Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has approved six new trials to test the use of drones in deliveries, inspections and emergency services, including one from e-commerce megabiz Amazon. "The regulator has chosen the trials to take place that will help safely integrate drones flying beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) of …
Yes, if they have data from 1000's of deliveries and the data is being passed to the US FAA for scrutiny to see if they can be allowed to continue or expand, surely passing the same data already collected to the UK CAA should be a no-brainer as it should only bolster their case. Unless, if course, they have something to hide.... ;-)
Are we speaking here of things six inches across with a prop at each corner, or things twelve feet long?
Will they be restricted to defined and published corridors?
What electronic conspicuity systems will they have, and equally, how can they detect other aircraft flying possibly without such systems and under VFR rules in (say) class G airspace?
Enquiring minds (who happen to be fairly concerned about meeting one while mid-air) want to know!
"Are we speaking here of things six inches across with a prop at each corner, or things twelve feet long?"
At a guess, they'd use different models appropriate to the range and load, however this link and photo may be indicative:
https://dronexl.co/2024/08/15/amazon-uk-drone-delivery-trial-bvlos/
So I'm guessing it's going to be a big, noisy, nuisance. Emergency services and surveying I can get. Delivery of the sort of complete tat Amazon now flog, no way. Hopefully ratboys everywhere will regard Amazon drones as deserving their worst attentions.
A further observation, have you seen the state of Amazon's vans? Most look like they've been put in a hundred foot high tumble dryer along with a crate of bricks. If that's how they care for their own property, and indicates the calibre of people Amazon employ, then the company shouldn't be allowed anywhere near drones. In fact, let's simplify it, just shut down Amazon, the world would be better off without them.
Inspections I can see the point of, deliveries is just more insanity of the "I must have everything NOW".
I expect there will be a list of exceptions on what is not covered when a delivery drone breaks something or worse hits something. From a security perspective there is bugger all difference to now as the just dump the parcels outside the front door anyway. It will just increase the likelihood of it being in the wrong place or left in the middle of a pavement.
Looking at the Disney action at the moment where they are using T&Cs for Disney+ to wriggle out of a serious case resulting in death all this has to be sorted first. Just like self driving vehicles.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8jl0ekjr0go
There has to be the ability to prosecute real people and hit the company with sanctions that are meaningful long before the stuff starts being used.
hoola,
You've got this wrong. The problem isn't that drone delivery is going too far - a solution that is more intrusive than the problem (slightly slower delivery).
The problem is that the solution doesn't go far enough!
I don't want my packages in several hours. Delivered by some drone that might get hijacked by local nerdowells! I want my delivery now!
Ricket delivery direct from the warehouse is the only acceptable method of rapid delivery! And I will brook no argument against this!
I want my £5 doormat delivered immediately! And by that I mean within minutes. From my slightest whim to satisfaction must be the greatest concern for society to fulfill.
Hmm. Oops!
OK damage control time. Have you heard about my favourite 50s kids cartoon? Rocket Ricketts was a kid who was unable to walk, due to the tragic deformity of his leg bones. But a kindly scientist equipped him with rocket boots - so he could fly round the world helping people. Or being the 50s perhaps selling cigarettes to children...
Does that sound plausible?
My new company will delivery you the DVD by SpaceX Falcon 9 - by 2026. You'll need a sufficiently large garden for the rocket to land - although you can always pay extra and we'll deliver to your neighbours house - and incinerate their roses instead.
My understanding is that they are closer to the 6ft size so are likely to have MODE-S and ADS-B, and the trial uses"special use airspace" (SUAS) for flying. My understanding is that the whole purpose of renaming "Danger Areas" as "Special Use Airspace" was for this purpose, and my guess is that the SUAS area around Fairford (DA218A/B) is part fo this trial.
This is not a mixed use airpsace trial. VFR traffic will be prohibited from entering the SUAS while the drones are flying.
i'd be concerned with meeting one of these head first while walking, or windshield first while driving. some or these aren't going to make it to their destination. power failure, prop/engine failure, intercepted midair by a pissed off bird, being grounded by a sudden downdraft, flying debris. In some parts of the country likely used a targets for sport shooting flying over someones backyard.
On the face of it, the idea of using drones to allow retailers to get orders to customers faster sounds cool, but it makes me think. Last week ordered something online, and got an email with some tracking info. Currently it looks like it's going to get to me in 5 working days of me placing the order. I was initially a bit disappointed - if only it get there a day earlier because I know I'll be around all day, with no 'left with a neighbour' business. Then I thought back to the good old days of mail order and the standard "please allow 28 days for delivery". 5 days versus 28? When is 'fast' fast enough? Maybe we all need to learn to be a bit more patient.
Yes I am an old man and yes, usually a grumpy one at that.
I don't know....I have some pretty weird desires...possibly weird enough to irrevocable freak the AI out enough to bring it to a grinding halt. In fact, if your scenario pans out then it could be me that prevents the singularity from happening.
Anon,
Allow me to introduce you to the GCU Grey Area...
It is more complicated than bricks-and-morter stores not being around as much.
We now have vastly more choice in what we can buy than back in the day. Whilst I can remember the days quite clearly when you had a choise of electrical or furniture (for example) retailers moderately local, they largely sold the same things. So it was easy to choose what would meet your needs, because you didn't have a huge list to chose from.
Imagine the cost of setting up, running, staffing and stocking local stores around the country for all of the items you can now buy from Amazon. It just wouldn't be possible. And we've come to expect that diversity of product, so that now anything less is unacceptable.
Electronic components were always a bit of a challenge. When Maplin was set up, they were mostly mail order (I know, they did have a very small number of shops, starting with just one), as were people like Watford Electronics (which did grow from a shop, but that wasn't much good if you were in, say, Newcastle).
For a brief period, you could get some components from Tandy, but their selection rarely covered enough to build a whole project, unless they sold a kit.
We look back at having actual shops with rose-tinted glasses, albeit with a small amount of justification. But we were just easier to satisfy then.
Taking the 28 day delivery time, the first week of that would be receiving the order and presenting and clearing the cheque (remember, no electronic payment systems), and the last week would be the actual shipping, which just wasn't as developed as it is now. The other two weeks or so would have been either for sorting out the order, or if I were cynical, sitting on the money in the bank so that it earned interest (or maybe both!)
Everything ran slower. Banking was slower (when was the last time you queued at a bank counter to get money), transport was slower, anything that required movement of information went on paper, possibly involving many people, and was thus slower.
Whilst some people may look back with fondness to a slower way of life, most of us (even those who lived through it) have actually forgotten how long it took to actually get anything done, and have been seduced by the Everything Now culture.
I do remember when I was a child, regularly having shopping trips to the nearest large town (my parents had a car, which was not a thing everyone had back then) to get things from shops that were not in the local smaller town. It became a day out, normally on a Saturday, which meant that you were fighting everyone else who was doing the same!
I do miss diverse town high streets, but I'm not sure how much I would use one even if it was there, and this is from someone who actually does appreciate physically seeing something before buying it, and just browsing to see what was available.
"Electronic components were always a bit of a challenge."
Not where I grew up. My first full time job was working at an electronics parts store. I need to see if they are still open. The owner's son and I competed for certain pretty young lady, he won, married her and last I heard, they have grandkids. Sigh.
"Everything ran slower. Banking was slower (when was the last time you queued at a bank counter to get money), transport was slower, anything that required movement of information went on paper, possibly involving many people, and was thus slower."
Agreed, except for transport. Whether road, rail or air, that's got progressively slower.
Really?
Going anywhere on a motorway, even one as congested as the M25 is almost certainly faster than, say traversing London or the orbital towns to get from one side to the other.
Before the M4/M5 travelling to the South West took hours longer. The M1 made travelling to the north take less than a day, whereas you may have had to factor in an overnight stop before.
I agree that there was a golden age for road transport in the '70s and '80s, just after the main motorway and by-pass building era, but go back to before any motorways were built, and you were mainly travelling on two-way roads, and often travelling through towns rather than around them was sooo slooow.
And remember, without dual carriage ways or motorways, you get a slow heavy goods vehicle in your way (and they used to be slow), together with your car not really having any significant performance meant that you could be travelling at 30 MPH or less for considerable periods.
The only thing that was possibly faster then was a train journey. Although the individual trains were slower, the larger number of branch lines plus the more frequent services meant that it was possible to take trains for journeys that will now require other transport to get to and from the stations, and may involve waiting around for the less frequent services.
In this part of the US, Fry's Electronics was that destination for me. If I needed the part or whatever (or wanted to physically see various potential items), I'd go there. The biggest problem I found was that the workers seemed to pay no attention to those of us who needed something specific out of a locked cabinet, and to get any assistance at all one had to wander around aimlessly with a large wad of cash clearly visible and preferably, blood dripping from a fresh lobotomy scar.
Yes I am an old man and yes, usually a grumpy one at that.
Us grizzlies have got less time left than the yoof, we can't afford to waste it waiting a day or two for deliveries! But I still don't think general merchandise retailers should be allowed to pollute the air around me or anybody else with their noisy drones.
My expectation: A heavily monitored trial with lots of professional staff goes very well. Government give the OK to tat-by-drone, and then the likes of Amazon (and worse, Hermes or whatever they are this week) employ the same sort of people who drive their vans to fly or supervise the drones, and before you know it the damned things are everywhere, disturbing the peace, shorting power lines, breaking aerials, bringing down phone lines, and getting entangled in trees like discarded Tesco bags.
Hope lies only with the criminal classes. Only small high value cargoes will merit drone delivery; Ergo, finding out how to force the drone down nets you a high value freebie. If they're as resourceful at hijacking Amazon drones as they are at thieving keyless cars, then tat-by-drone will soon be called off.
If you can't wait a day or three then may I humbly suggest that you need to look at how you are using your time. In very few cases (from experience) do you reallly, really need it now, right now.
I have plenty of projects on the go. If I need something on one then I order it and get on with another job.
Time management is a skill. Perhaps you need to look at how you manage your time.
Piss Poor Planning and all that.
The CAA and government reacted to the early rise of drones by making a complete mess of introducing regulation (because nothing helps an industry grow like the uncertain threat of being unable to use the expensive equipment you rely on), running a series of pointless consultations and setting the restrictions so low that many nascent businesses just closed up shop (or in at least a couple of cases, move country to somewhere that supported them).
As a result, the UK can boast virtually no home-grown drone manufacturers, very little business activity and strangled skills in the technology. Ignoring Amazon, there are plenty of great uses for drones, from agriculture through to construction, and on to safety and rescue, asset management and of course recreation. These are being explored in the USA, Africa, Asia, Poland... basically anywhere other than the UK.
This is an area we could have excelled in (having a healthy aerospace and automotive high tech sector), but it was screwed up by an understaffed CAA, a civil service that saw a great opportunity to keep a few more staff busy, and a government that responded to Daily Mail headlines by promising meaningless and much delayed regulation. Astonishingly this is being treated like an academic exercise by those on the gravy train, rather than a sector that we could actually compete in on a global scale.
Well, I say astonishingly. Most people in the business were predicting this result eight years ago, and regularly ever since.
> setting the restrictions so low that many nascent businesses just closed up shop
If they couldn't handle restrictions that were set low then they could only handle no restrictions. Good riddance.
Low restrictions don't harm business, unless its the business of enforcing restrictions.
Clearly you have no experience in the area. I can only assume you work for the government.
Weight restrictions have been critical - specifically the cut off between different classes of drones that were divided into too many tiers, with banding that was beyond the available technology at the time the regulations were first introduced. It meant that the only drones that could be purchased were in a limbo of maybe/maybe not being unable to fly. When some of these machines cost thousands or even tens of thousands of pounds the answer has been that responsible businesses simply moved elsewhere rather than run unnecessary risks.
This is not a question of safety despite the moronic headlines - a lot of use cases are a long way away from people, and it turns out most drones are remarkably good at not causing damage. It's just that uncertain rules made it impossible to invest in technology that might at any moment be banned. Hence agricultural drones being built and used in South Africa, Asia and America.
So what exactly are you saying good riddance to?
Its absolutley a question of safety - all of aviation is about safety and for good reason. There is no good reason why drone pilots should not have to follow the same restrictions I do as a pilot, and no reason drone manufacturers should get away with lower saftety levels compared to plane or helicopter manufacturers.
In my view the regulations are already too loose, there have been multiple near misses where people have been flying recreational drones in the circuit (less so recently since rules were tightened) at the airport I fly from.The only option to ATC at that point is to close the airport, which is a huge pain.
Since when did your plane weigh 250 grams? You are held to different regulations because you alone weigh around 300 times that of a basic drone, even before you step into a plane or helicopter. If you don't understand that, you probably shouldn't be flying.
The basic drone rules deal very clearly with safety around airports and other aircraft - no-one is objecting to those, and they've been established for years. That said, even with some people deliberately breaking the law, and despite millions of drone flights every year there has not been a single manned aircraft that has been seriously damaged by a drone strike. In fact only four strikes have been verified worldwide in the last decade (one of which was a hot air balloon!) - all of which were delt with without incident.
The issues have been caused when regulation that has nothing to do with sharing airspace has been delayed and complicated as the CAA tries to deal with hysterical nonsense that has no basis in anything other than Daily Mail headlines. Just to be really clear here - this is not about avoiding regulation, but about the failure to provide clarity, consistency and simplicity at exactly the point when new businesses were being established around innovative technology. We are massively behind the curve in the UK and likely to remain there as companies gave up waiting for questions to be resolved and moved elsewhere. That's nothing to do with a lack of safety, but the impact of poorly managed and over-zealous regulatory capture.
I am of course sorry that people breaking already established laws have inconvenienced your ATC - but that is nothing to do with the mess that drone regulation has been under the last few governments.
I can't even get decent tracking info the way things stand, example..
Düsseldorf > Barcelona > me 16 Aug 2024
Last notification was the 8th and my box was in Düsseldorf.
Panicked phone call from the delivery driver on the 12th saying he's standing on my doorstep.
Start with the basics, worry about wanky mini helicopters later.
. delivery drones.
We've spent decades reducing noise from vehicles, no we face drones.
If you thing it's exaggerated, listen to a single drone...now image ten, a hundred, a thousand.
Do you REALLY need that bit of pointless tat two hours earlier?
I dropped Amazon's bullshit lying Prime (remember when it used to be next day?}
And I've saved a fortune. Im now more likely to shop around and get it for less money. In fact it also stopped impulsive buying knowing, shock, it may take a week to get to me.
I am in the sticks in rural Somerset in the UK (well, a small coastal town some distance from motorways and decent A roads), and Amazon Prime items that are flagged next-day delivery, provided they are ordered before the deadline, nearly always arrive next day. I find it quite unbelievable really.
Amazon have many flaws, but their logistics are not one of them, at least not in the UK.
Ditto here on Tyneside in NE England. I know of at least 4 Amazon warehouses within 30 or so miles of me, one of which, just off the A1(M), is a massive regional hub. Even without Prime, it's rare we have to wait more than 24 hours for a delivery. One of those Amazon warehouse is less than 5 miles drive from my house, which probably also helps. I appreciate that it may be different elsewhere, especially with the UK being, on the whole, small and quite densely populated so a properly located warehouse can service multiple towns. Whereas in the USA, it's not that unusual for towns and cities to be spaced out by many miles
"We've spent decades reducing noise from vehicles, no we face drones."
I'm surprised they are still being pushed. It can't be an inexpensive method for shipping so whatever the drone is transporting will be on the more expensive side of the catalog. The drones are chockablock with nice batteries, motors and other componentry that can fetch some decent coin and at some point there will be a replacement motherboard and controller available on AliExpress. Once the safety overrides are known, there will be people forcing the drones to land so they can be taken away. Step one, Faraday net bag to block any tracking beacons.
"In a similar fashion here, kids will just dump a Coop delivery robot into the canal…. ‘Cos they can."
I can see that some people with mobility issues can really use this sort of service, but people like me need to get off their lazy butts and walk to the local shop. One of my neighbors can use some assistance from time to time so I'll ask them if they want me to pick anything up for them when I go to the store. Another neighbor has a pickup and will ask me if I need something from the lumber store if he's making a trip there. The robot drone delivery services (ground and air) are something that I see as facilitating poor impulse control and/or self-isolation more than a good solution for the few that have difficulty going out. Our city has a subsidized "dial-a-ride" service for the handicapped and seniors. I don't know if they'll pick up and deliver stuff, but they should.
And if the urgent thing you need is, say, 300 miles away by car, or won't fit in your car, or you don't have a car? Sometimes we have an urgent need for something that's impractical / impossible to fetch ourselves. Same day and overnight services eliminate a lot of that.
But, drone delivery is pointless. The type of goods are likely by definition to be small stuff, fairly lightweight. Maybe a few kilos max. They might bring a six-pack and some crisps. They're not bringing a washing machine. Unless you've got serious mobility issues, or are stuck in the house e.g. childcare, adult care, that sort of stuff is usually within range and it's just lazy not to go get it.
Noisy, wasteful, and just wait 'til one falls out of the sky onto a person, car, greenhouse, whatever. One accident will kill this dead.
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