UK lays world's longest autonomous drone superhighway The United Kingdom - or, rather, a 165-mile stretch of it - will soon be the home of the longest autonomous drone highway in the world. Project Skyway's 265km route will stretch from Reading to Coventry, forming a "T" shape by jutting out north of Oxford and running to Cambridge. Milton Keynes and Rugby are also in the Skyway' …
The 1979 "Highway To Hell" album and the track would be "Shot Down in Flames" ?
I'm only picturing an average of about 2 drones a minute flying overhead 24/7 (~1 million drones a year) eventually driving the people living below this test path nuts.
I also wonder will the paths chosen mysteriously avoid all golf and cricket clubs.
Is it even a "T" shape?
Excellent and about time, already places like australia employ drones for delivering urgent items such as blood to remote locations. Here in the UK we don't have the remote locations, at least very few, but we do have a need for high speed deliveries. Most major hospitals already have a helipad, yet I don't see the NHS taking advantage of them for drone deliveries. By drone here I'm not talk about DJI Phantom, more like massive industrial sized drones capable of speeds of hundreds of miles an hour and carrying 100kg, 100s of miles. With such a load capacity, a human body could even be put in a protective cocoon and flown to another hospital if some emergency treatment was needed.
"Here in the UK we don't have the remote locations, at least very few"
And fewer still in a T shape between Reading,Oxford, Coventry and Cambridge.
"With such a load capacity, a human body could even be put in a protective cocoon and flown to another hospital if some emergency treatment was needed."
And when the medically unattended passenger is DoA it'll be a bit of a problem determining place of death.
I was wondering if the primary purpose of the Oxford - Milton Keynes - Cambridge route, was to connect the Radcliffe, MK and Addenbrookes hospitals - primarily for organ and other urgent medical transfers.
Obviously, it only needs the corridor to be correctly defined for these to be within the "SKyway" and thus avoid the "The off-Skyway last mile of a drone's trip".
The trouble is coming up with reasonable use cases for this specific corridor.
As whilst this is a scaled up testbed, it does need a reasonable amount of traffic to work on.
Another potential user is Amazon - with all their warehousing at Milton Keynes. But then if that was the case, they would probably be mentioned as being an investor in the project.
And when the medically unattended passenger is DoA it'll be a bit of a problem determining place of death.
I should think vitals would be monitored and logged as would location as the "delivery" progressed. This should be as simple as corelating two logs. I can only hope the human delivery compartments will look like giant pizza boxes and the tracking app will be licensed from Dominos.
"Here in the UK we don't have the remote locations, at least very few"
Actually, there are lots of remote locations in Scotland (and I expect England, Wales and Northern Ireland, too) and drones have been used recently in Scotland for medical supplies including "coronavirus test kits and samples, medicines and equipment between three hospitals and a medical practice" (https://business.esa.int/news/drones-take-to-scottish-skies-to-support-covid-battle).
'What about the essential vaccines?' is the 'Think about the children' for autonomous drone delivery. A motorbike can do Reading to Oxford in 20 minutes or so (it was late at night, pre speed camera, and I was a young idiot). And I imagine a trained pigeon would be as quick, and cheaper, than a drone.
The fact most hospitals have a helipad and already have regular visits from air ambulances is exactly why drones don't go there. The helipad makes the airspace around the hospital restricted and not legal for drones to enter. Removing that restriction and classifying it for automated drones would prevent helicopters from landing there.
There is already significant use of networks of private pilots for transporting urgent items (via ambulance to the nearest GA airfield, via air to the destination airfield, then via ambulance to the destination hospital) such as organs and blood (especially between the mainland UK and northern Ireland, the isle of wight, isle of Man etc) in their own time and at their own cost (similar to the bloodbikes scheme that uses motorcycles for the same thing).
At the moment, drones are not smart enough to avoid conflicting with the much more useful helicopters that land there, so the helicopters win. Part of the aim of this project is to scale up technology that may one day help with that deconfliction and help make the drones smarter.
Oh yes; the general situation is that more controlled airspace is higher up. So you can, for example, fly under the controlled airspace around an airport, except in its immediate vicinity where the control goes to ground level.
But generally, class G runs from ground to 10,000 feet, or higher in some locations, and that's where GA flies VFR. I think if the drones are flying commercial patterns with defined high altitude corridors and between terminal controlled locations, there shouldn't be an issue - except when they are forced to descend out of it for e.g. an emergency descent.
The point being that I'm unsure whether an autonomous drone, or even a remotely controlled one, can fly VFR.
I guess I'll have a better opinion - I could be concerned over nothing - when I get more info on this.
They’ve now got patrol dogs who are barking, which helps deter drones
They found a willing volunteer to take part in the inaugural run
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/05/09/16/13298386-0-image-a-64_1557414794402.jpg
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