Unfortunately, I missed the very valid points raised in Jack's last post, and Step Turn, that is priceless.

Jack,

MTOW: I have a half-share in one that can lift 1 kg easily, its weight with batteries is 2.5 kg. But flying time at 3.5 kg is on the order of 9 minutes. With 0.5 kg payload another battery pack could be added for 18 minutes total duration. Its cruising speed would be 10 m/s which gives an effective range of 3 km. This is 2015 technology. To deliver 5kg to a destination say 3 km away would probably result in a TOW somewhere in the 25 kg region. Which the CAA consider to be a "heavy".

Problems at destination: Equipped with a video link an operator could monitor the delivery, and do the equivalent of UPS's "no-one in" driveby.

Takeoff: The transmitter for ours says "All clear above and behind?" when the throttle reaches 10%. Takeoff is at about 65-70%. At the delivery end a small speaker could do the same, in fact cover a range of situations. We don't have the facilities to test with dogs; cats are interested but don't come near, too noisy. (This is while motor testing tied to a 50kg garden table with 4 cats hanging around.)

UAV problems: There is a range of telemetry that can be sent back. Some the the larger systems use an Arduino computer for on-board control, and that can be programmed for all sorts of situations. If a motor fails the controllers for 6 & 8 motor UAVS can cope to some extent, generally by landing where they are. Controllers with 3 or 4 motors cannot cope.

IFR?: No reason they can't be made waterproof. Just adds a little more weight for covers and seals. Probably a good idea to make sure the payload can stand being in the vigorous shower from the props though.


However using them for real delivery is just a PT Barnum show. I'm sure it will be done, but expect a brown/yellow/white van at your own door.


'b

How does it release it's payload? If you've ordered a book, (usually, fairly heavy too), does it leave it out in the rain?

Already waterproof.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vGcH0Bk3hg

In answer to some of the other questions, I understand they don't intend to ever land them.

I believe the package will be lowered?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2itwFJCgFQ

If you watch the TED talk video I posted above you will see a quadcopter having two of its props cut off with scissors and still flyable in a emergency mode with all axis control possible.

Whether it all happens, who knows, but I do know that for it to be worth doing they have to be autonomous to make it worth the effort. If each one has a pilot then there is no saving.

The cocknockers featured in the video tell you everything you need to know.
NEXT! :E

Which video, and what do you mean?

Er,
The last 2 videos you posted.

Thats a fair spread of "cocknockers";)

From science geeks to engineers to snowboarders to kayakers to octogenarian hillwalkers...


I think you should invest in a few more derogatory epithets for your vocabulary to ensure people know exactly what type of cocknockers you are referring to at any particular juncture.

Nah,
I think the problem is, and increasingly will be....Twerps who launch their little camera-carrying toy-helicopters, 'because I've paid for it, the technology exists, and I can', and stuff the safety of everyone else, both in the air, and on the ground.
To get signed-off as a PPL, (A,H, gliders/balloons), takes a lot of financial input, practical experience, theoretical study and common-sense.
I note from another discussion that you mention MER. What is the MER for 'drone-pilots', and where is it detailed?

All good questions, and if I were Amazon or any of the other 'players', I would be keeping the answers very quiet until I had the whole lot wrapped up in patents etc. Don't assume the videos they have put out so far are anything like what they really plan to do. They may simply be to throw the competition off the scent.

Google and Amazon's shareholders won't be impressed if the management are not exploiting an opportunity which could give them a considerable return on investment. If paying for ATSOCAS to expand is what it takes, then maybe they will. In which case, remember 'He who pays the piper calls the tune'.

There will no doubt be some very serious lobbying by the courier companies, citing environmental benefits (less vans clogging up roads, delivery as the crow flies etc.), so anyone using a helicopter for a job another drone could conceivably do, had better start putting an extremely good justification for their continued existence together. 'We were here first' won't carry much weight.

Heavier-than-air powered aviation has yet to pass the point that it exceeds every human lifetime. We need to be looking at the next hundred years, not just the next ten or twenty.

"Google and Amazon's shareholders won't be impressed if the management are not exploiting an opportunity which could give them a considerable return on their investment".
Neither will the folks in Windsor if one of these things accidentally encounters an A319 approaching EGLL and causes it to alight in the high street, as opposed to 09L.

Birds, PPLs, model aircraft, etc., are all completely irrelevant.

Whatever baseline risk they collectively represent today, drones add new safety concerns above and beyond that baseline.

We're only at the inception of the drone age. There are already over 500,000 drones sold in the US alone and the drone market is expected to grow exponentially in the next decade when shipments of drones are expected to be in the millions (!) of units each and every year.

Casualties due to unregulated drone use is a matter of when, not if.

peekay4 is spot on. If something can go wrong.....one day it will.

I'll give you one example.

If you look at the STAR charts for EGGP, you'll see there is a holding-pattern to the NW called 'TIPOD'. But why is it called 'TIPOD'?
When the inbound procedures were changed, (a long time ago), and that holding-fix was introduced, it was originally called 'LIVPO'. "Hang-on" we said, that's very similar to the name of the airfield's NDB, 'LPL', (which also had a published holding-pattern), 4 miles east of the field. We were concerned that one day, someone would get them confused. "There shouldn't be a problem", said the Ops department, (who had developed the procedures), "but we'll monitor the situation".
They didn't have to monitor it for long.
I was on the morning, about 2 weeks later, that someone, who had been cleared to LIVPO, went to the NDB by mistake. The NDB is about 15nm west of a larger airport, and conflicts with several of that airport's SIDS. In accordance with one of 'Murph'y Laws, this happened during the larger airport's westbound trans-Atlantic departure period, and for 5 minutes or so, it got very exciting.
The name 'TIPOD was introduced the following day.

All the professionals involved in that scenario were fully-trained and licensed, all and had the best intentions in The World, but succumbed to yet another 'Gotcha'.

99.99% of those customers in the 'drone-market' that peekay mentions will not be fully-trained and licensed.

Peekay

It is not a baseline.
It is merely the current state of affairs.

Why should any new activity have to achieve higher safety than old activities?

Birds we can't really stop, but PPLs we could ban tomorrow.

By banning PPls we would definitely stop major accidents.
That is an incontrovertible fact.
Despite this I hear no calls to do so.

By banning drones we merely have reason to believe that we might stop accidents in future. There is as yet no evidence to prove this.


ZOOKER

You keep coming back to this "PPL pilots are trained" cr@p.

It is entirely irrelevant whether they are trained or not. They keep causing accidents and killing hundreds of people!!
Obviously the training is inadequate.

When a PPL hits an airliner it usually takes it down.
When a toy drone hits a Cessna it barely leaves a dent.

If the head of the CAA was given a £1 Million bonus for every life saved in accidents in the UK and had the power to ban either PPL or UAV, which do you think he would choose?



p.s. Does anybody on here really think that a PPL in any way could be described as "takes a lot of financial input, practical experience, theoretical study and common-sense."

Cash, yes it requires it.
The rest, not so much.

It takes two to tango. How about when an airliner hits a PPL they both go down, or an F-16 in a recent case. See and be seen has its limits.And you'll find CPL, ATPL and military who also qualify. Spokane B-52 being a classic.

Agreed.

So why is it the toy drones that have yet to kill anybody we are talking about banning?

Tourist,
may I suggest you take time to read the whole thread? All the answers to that question are there.

No, not any answers that are valid to me.

Fortunately, It matters little.

Drones are here to stay, and those that are trying to stand in their way are like the Luddites, Saboteurs and similar ilk from the past.

Doomed to fail.

Yes there were accidents on the new fangled trains/cars/planes etc, but new tech is here to stay.

#344
 

AVweb now reports that the Illinois incident last week was a bird-strike ("small, non-predatory bird"):
www.avweb.com/avwebflash/news/Reported-Drone-Collision-Was-a-Birdstrike-224805-1.html

Tourist,

Do you have to wait for somebody to die before you ban something that has obvious potential hazards to large numbers of life?

Do you mean private small planes carrying two or more people ploughing into an orphanage?

Yes, of course that's what I meant. :hmm::ugh:

I'm going to take the liberty of rephrasing your question for clarity.

"Should scientists wait for evidence to back up a scientific theory, or should they proceed on an assumption that flies in the face of years of empirical observation"

Incidentally, I'll lay my cards on the table.


If a drone takes out an airliner tomorrow, I still don't think they should be banned.

All new (and in fact old) technologies have accidents.

That is part of the path of life.

Planes kill people.
Cars kill people.
Nuclear power stations kill people.
Coal fire power stations kill people.
Knives kill people.
Trains kill people.
Lawnmowers kill people.
Footballs kill people.
Trousers kill people. (go read the ONS report!)
Ladders kill people.
Pets kill people.

Drones will, eventually, kill some people.

So what?

Nothing is all good or all bad. (except Morris Dancing. It has no redeeming features)
Drones have the potential to revolutionise many areas of life and I think society will look back and laugh at the current luddites.

Tourist:I know you were joking, but in this context morris dancing does have a redeeming feature: it very rarely kills people.

More often than toy drones then....

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1478668/

Isn't google great......

Tourist you forgot one:

Life kills people.

Aaah, life; the ultimate terminal disease.

The Swarm
 

Better watch out if this one ever gets out of ground effect...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5JgnMJzCtQ

I believe being born is the number one cause of dying

The Swarm
 

This fellow needs a orange "hi vis" vest so you can see him on short final.

i dont think a drone and a commercial aircraft will do much, if anything, as for nuclear power, well, only 15 world wide... others have died from cancers, but at a rate no worse than the gloabl average..

back to drones, they are very light compared to an equivelent sized bird, they are a plastic housing, with a few small circuit boards, 4 small engines about the size of a few coins, and a battery.
in all seriouslness, i doubt they would cause more damage than a bird..

http://blog.loclum.com/wp-content/up...Octocopter.jpg

Just that camera with lens is about 1600 grams, metal framed body. Sturdy enough to punch trough quite a lot......

Not all drones are created equal......

And how many untrained idiots do you think have one of those as a toy?

Looking at The Swarm video posted above, I can't help wondering what Paul Moller did with all that cash considering he never got past "tethered flight" stage with his "Skycar"... With this new technology droning on, it should be easy - the skycar is nothing more than a fancy quadcopter.

link to article
 

Sorry for the late reply, I work in an area with extremely limited communications. Here is the link to the ISR drone crash in question. 3 Civilian Bodies Found from Afghan Crash - CBS News
Dan

A certain bird that is 9 or 10 cm long and 13 to 17 cm span weighs 9 to 13 g

A forthcoming iPhone weighs 193 g

OK, larger bird needed. 17 to 22 cm long, 30 to 40 cm span, 30 to 75 g weight

That crash was a ISR Kingair, not a drone. I see no mention of a drone being involved, and I would question what a C-12 would be doing in RVSM airspace over Afghan as you stated earlier.
I'm willing to accept its possible that it happened though but it is hardly relevant. A predator is a full size aircraft in a war zone that just happens to be unmanned. Hardly the same as toy quadcopters.

aox

I'm slightly confused as to what you are saying.
You are aware that there are 10kg birds on this planet?

Of course. In fact by coincidence I recently mentioned the albatross in a now deleted post. Perhaps you saw it briefly.

I'm replying to a post asserting that for equivalent size a collection of a few circuit boards and battery etc is very light compared to a bird.

I gave a well-known example of some electronics that is 10 times heavier than about the same size bird and still over double the weight of a larger bird.

We could find other examples, such as quadcopter advertising that says 500 to 2000 gram payload plus its own weight on 4 x 10 inch rotors, but as a first approximation maybe the claim is a bit stretched much of the time.

Ok, I fair enough.:ok: