no one
insurance, just like in a road accident
insurance, just like in a road accident
those whose job it is to clean up said commodities after whatever accident

I agree this is not going to happen anywhere soon, but not for your reasons. The blocking factors are
* physical delivery - even to a person living on the -2
* legally binding acceptance of delivery - requires a signature, doesn't it? The signature may be digital, in my country one can legally sign a document by presenting the eID card and typing the pin code. But it still needs the physical presence of the adressee.

I am not sure that this is a good comparison to try to argue your case... There were a string of accidents, which was at least partly to blame for why they are no longer around. The same will apply to drones... All in good time!

Although progress is being made in this area - I don't think it will become a reality anytime soon. Anyone else read the crash / near misses / driver required to take actions to avoid collision, statistics of Google's driverless car? I did (I worked on this) - there were thousands more than were reported - and that makes me seriously doubt any sane insurance companies will cover them (again in the short term - 10 years down the line it will be a different story though).


I disagree - someone MUST be made accountable for the accident, otherwise nobody will require the insurance to clean up the mess. For instance, if an aeroplane engineer forgets something in the maintenance schedule and signs it off, everybody died on the first flight due to engineering faults - the blame is not with the operator, but with the engineers that maintain the aeroplane. The same will need to apply to drones.

What sane insurance company will pay for drones to fly over a city!? Damages of a 30+Kg machine crashing from say 400ft up without considering the forward momentum, the initial impact force (before bounce) will be just over 355 thousand Newtons, equivalent to just over 36 metric tons. The damage that this will cause with this small a surface area could be substantial. A single accident could cost millions of pounds of repairs, and / or damage. In central London this could be tens of millions of pounds!!! A car would need to be travelling at around 105mph to cause the same impact force. Which is still somehow unlikely to happen on a busy day in central London (where traffic is pretty standstill). However, I could see a drone be overhead! But furthermore this one crash could destroy the road causing mayhem for thousands of people!

Anyway... Dead argument... Its not going to happen anytime soon!

The one that charges sufficiently. Insurance is not complicated on the principles, only some parameters are hard to estimate for new business.

No, I don't work on them but I wish I did!

You've given a lot of reasons why they might not get a free ride in the UK, but not all countries work to the same standards: doubtless this will be the reason the first 'serious' drone services operate in rural Africa. I don't know how smoothly they're going, but some of the newspaper articles talk about 150 flights a day. If they can be developed to the point where they're safe there, then ultimately they will arrive here. But at least some Western countries are likely to allow them be to be developed on home soil: they'll simply be too big a business to be left to be abandoned to other countries to develop.

Perhaps I'm seeing the issue too literally, but UAVs are aircraft and are sharing the airspace with other aircraft; whether they are manned or not is irrelevant. The same rules apply to everyone in order to protect everyone!

I disagree that legislation needs to change to accommodate UAVs. The vast majority of aircraft are and will remain manned whilst also having the not so trifling matter of carrying lots of people. People's lives being priceless ahead of profit or convenience of UAV operation, legislation must reflect this.

I know you were talking about cars, but I think that's the important line.

That's factually incorrect. Googling around suggests that there are about 20,000 airliners in operation globally, perhaps 300,000 GA aircraft, and 100,000 military aircraft. In contrast they sell well over a million serious-hobbyist drones a year, and large numbers of radio-controlled aircraft and vast numbers of smaller flying toys. The USAF now has more drones than manned aircraft as do the British military. There are apparently 1600 remote-control crop-spraying helicopters in Japan - the RMAX which I believe is the most common one has an AUW of about 90kg and costs about $90,000 so they're not toys.

The number of flying hours is a different question, but when I was seriously into r/c helicopters my annual r/c flying hours were rather higher than I have averaged with my PPL so I doubt it's trivial.

Drones are already here in large numbers: what's in question is how long it's likely to take for autonomous drones to become widely adopted.

Lives are important, but consider that about 60 light-goods-vehicle drivers are killed every year in the UK and 600 seriously injured. They also kill about 60 cyclists. I can't be bothered to find the stats for pedestrians and car-drivers, but suffice to say that there's a lot of truth in the stereotype of the 'White Van Man'.

The most dangerous roads are fast rural roads, so in remote areas such as the Scottish highlands and islands where the roads are dangerous and people sparse, you could have quite a high drone accident rate and still harm fewer people than if you sent the goods by road.

Andrewgr2

Totally correct. UK policy is that unless the UAV is operating with a certified "sense and avoid" system, which to the best of my knowledge there are none currently in the UK, the drone (assuming it is 20kg or less) can only operate within visual line of sight of the pilot (not above 400 Ft agl and typically 500m) unless operated within segregated airspace (ie a Prohibited/Restricted or Danger Area). How are Amazon going to resolve this?

abgd,

Interesting points you raise, despite the statistics I'd still say the core of aviation is and will remain manned aircraft. Also regarding White Van Man - the roads are and will remain way more dangerous than the air, whilst I agree again with the statistics the question remains how many people are willing to accept that automation will get rid of lots of jobs.

This is the other big concern of mine, safety aside. We all need to make a living in order to provide for ourselves and our families. When all the jobs have gone to machines, what will all the people do? They won't just disappear, they will all need to eat and have a roof over their heads. The social implications of relentless automation are argubly even more massive than the safety implications.

Telsboy


How right you are ! Industrial automation is potentially the most explosive problem faced by industrialised societies around the world. A possible solution? Devising jobs perhaps of a social nature, that cannot readily be automated.


Drone deliveries capture the headlines but, for a variety of reasons as others have explained, remain largely impractical.

IMHO while one can think of lots of difficulties for delivery drones, there are probably solutions today .... there will certainly be solutions in a year or two. In 10 years they will be commodity items.