Google-affiliated air delivery business Wing has finally taken flight, after a longer than anticipated journey to approval.
Key points:
- In April the company was given the green light to take to the skies above Canberra
- Wing, run by Google's overarching company Alphabet, had been trialling delivering burritos, coffee and medication for a year
- CASA officials say the question of who gets to 'play' in drone airspace is one being considered around the world
From today Wing will be flying donuts by drone to select suburbs in Canberra in celebration of America's National Donut Day.
And, with those drones in the air, Google can now lay claim to the drone airspace under the current air safety framework.
While Wing's drones can safely fly together, as they all communicate with each other through its proprietary unmanned traffic system, a second company's drones would not talk to Wing's, and would not currently be able to safely share the air.
Who gets to 'play' in drone airspace?
At an ACT inquiry into commercial drones, Civil Aviation and Safety Authority (CASA) officials said who could share drone airspace was a complicated issue.
"It will be problematic, and it will be something we will have to look at, when two operators want to use the same space, and we will have to address it," head of operations Chris Monahan said.
A second CASA official said how two operating networks avoided colliding with each other would "certainly" need to be considered before issuing any approvals.
Mr Monahan said CASA would not take a first-come-first-served approach, giving Google exclusive rights to the air "by default".
Though his colleague Dr Jonathan Aleck noted they would not be able to tolerate more than one operator if it threatened safety.
The CASA officials said they were hard at work to answer that question, which was being asked around the world.
Dr Matthew Marino, a researcher for Aerospace company Thales and the Unmanned Aircraft System's Team at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, said it was not clear whether Google would open up its software for other companies.
"It depends how successful their platform is," Dr Marino said.
"They might develop a platform that they could basically sell off to other companies, or a platform that's accepted by a regulator like CASA, in which they would have the monopoly on that piece of software.
"It's hard to say if a company would share that type of intellectual property around."
CASA officials, for their part, said there was "a race on" around the world to effectively integrate the different operators.
Dr Marino was confident CASA would be able to develop a framework in time that would allow multiple companies into the airspace.