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Having large numbers of drones in the sky, where any failure has the potential to drop a large weight on a person seems like a show stopper. Or just crashing on

Having large numbers of drones in the sky, where any failure has the potential to drop a large weight on a person seems like a show stopper. Or just crashing onto a house or car and causing damage is going to get annoying for the community real fast. I doubt drones can be made as reliable as aeroplanes at anything like a realistic price.

weddpros 7y ago
This is an emotional answer: "any failure...potential... large weight... person... show stopper". That's emotions speaking, we need probabilities and reason instead (because a delivery truck should trigger the same fear with you but it doesn't). Planes ARE the safest way to travel: maybe drones are the safest in certain conditions, like for these urgent hospital deliveries in Switzerland, or in dangerous/isolated settings. And maybe drones will become safer and safer, like with parachutes in the article. Okay the parachutes will need Dyneema strings instead of simple ones, just like parachutes were used before Dyneema was invented. Oh wait, someone's working on Dyneema parachutes for drones: https://www.textilemedia.com/latest-news/mobiletex/drone-parachute-manufactured-from-dyneema/ https://www.textilemedia.com/latest-news/mobiletex/drone-par... As you can see, there's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Find how you can save lives and make the world better, not how to use emotions to exert power and kill Freedom. The world needs innovation more than ever, be it electronic cigarettes or self driving cars or drones.
- sytelus 7y ago
  Probabilities and stats are actually incomplete and naive way people justify human deaths. Let's say you hit another car and kill another driver because you were texting. This would lead to perhaps prison, heavy fines and taking you off the road to prevent future incidence. However, cars themselves would not get banned. Now imagine the accident was because of car malfunction and not your mistake. What would happen? You guessed right: that models of cars would be taken away from the road. Now here's a thought experiment: Let's say humans have a choice of only two models of cars: A and B. Car A fails less often, kills fewer people overall but none of the failures are due to human mistake. It just speeds up randomly and uncontrollably sometimes and kills whoever is on the way. Engineers have raised their hand that this cannot be fixed for a few years. On the other hand, car B fails only when a human makes a mistake even though its statistically 10X more overall failures per year. Which car society would approve?
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  This is a fanboy answer: "Planes ARE the safest way to travel: maybe drones are the safest in certain conditions" Western airliners are very safe, but the USA averages one GA accident per day: https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=21274 https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=2... Helicopters have much worse failure modes, even in multi-million dollar aircraft. Small drones are the worst of all, and should not be flown over populated areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_nut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_nut The FAA historically has regulated that aircraft fly 500' and above over non sparsely-populated areas for a reason. Or you lose your license. Drone deliveries fundamentally violate that, as regardless of where your warehouse is located, you're deliberately flying towards a populated area (ie. customers.) The above is why the FAA has justly been slow on allowing drones into the airspace, and why you have to register them. A constructive comment I can add is that I can only see delivery drones being safe with a built-in fixed wing that allows it to glide to the ground power-off below 10 mph. Source: commercially-rated airplane pilot.
  - weddpros 7y ago
    347 lives lost per year, or one per million people. Similar to Prion disease fatalities. Sure, that's 3 times more than lightening strikes... but that's still extremely low AND safer than whatever. As for the risk of a plane over a populated area, I think it's safe to say that a 4kg drone is a much lesser threat than a Cessna weighing 200 times more, and that's a very small plane. So it's really not fair to compare a drone crash and a plane crash (we're not talking military drones here, I hope you've read the article). "...I can only see delivery drones being safe with a built-in fixed wing that allows it to glide to the ground power-off below 10 mph": and it seems many people disagree but feel free to prove them wrong and show the world how you can glide a drone to the ground in a dense city to deliver blood at a hospital.
  - FDSGSG 7y ago
    GA is very safe too, there are just lots of very unsafe GA pilots.
- oldgradstudent 7y ago
  Airliners have (2000-2010) 0.2 fatalities per 10 billion passenger-mile. That's passenger-mile - there are tens or hundreds of passenger on each flight. In 2017, UPS had 5 fatalities per 14 billion miles driven, or 3.6 fatalities per 10 billion miles. Given that a UPS truck has tens or hundreds of packages the fatalities per package-mile is much lower. Using UPS would be far safer than using delivery drones, even delivery drones reach the reliability and safety levels of commercial airliners.
TylerE 7y ago
Fit them with ballistic chutes. If you could slow the descent to 10-15mph that'd reduce the potential for damage quite a bit.
- sytelus 7y ago
  This was the solution in OP article but the 2nd crash happened when chute itself failed.
bigiain 7y ago
It doesn't seem too unreasonable to plan for requiring the drones spend as much as possible of the route they fly take place over places where the risk of dropping them on a person is small. Fly them preferentially over roads/railwaylines/rivers/canals/buildings instead of sidewalks/schools/parks. Require them to be insured for personal and property damage (in much the same way as cars are in many places), have the companies operating them be subject to the same sort of existential threat as Boeing is under right now if they fuck up. I don't think this should be an industry lead by "move fast and break things" style engineering, but I suspect if could usefully exist with a lower regulatory standard/cost than commercial airlines...

weddpros 7y ago

This is an emotional answer: "any failure...potential... large weight... person... show stopper". That's emotions speaking, we need probabilities and reason instead (because a delivery truck should trigger the same fear with you but it doesn't). Planes ARE the safest way to travel: maybe drones are the safest in certain conditions, like for these urgent hospital deliveries in Switzerland, or in dangerous/isolated settings. And maybe drones will become safer and safer, like with parachutes in the article. Okay the parachutes will need Dyneema strings instead of simple ones, just like parachutes were used before Dyneema was invented. Oh wait, someone's working on Dyneema parachutes for drones: https://www.textilemedia.com/latest-news/mobiletex/drone-parachute-manufactured-from-dyneema/ https://www.textilemedia.com/latest-news/mobiletex/drone-par... As you can see, there's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Find how you can save lives and make the world better, not how to use emotions to exert power and kill Freedom. The world needs innovation more than ever, be it electronic cigarettes or self driving cars or drones.

sytelus 7y ago
Probabilities and stats are actually incomplete and naive way people justify human deaths. Let's say you hit another car and kill another driver because you were texting. This would lead to perhaps prison, heavy fines and taking you off the road to prevent future incidence. However, cars themselves would not get banned. Now imagine the accident was because of car malfunction and not your mistake. What would happen? You guessed right: that models of cars would be taken away from the road. Now here's a thought experiment: Let's say humans have a choice of only two models of cars: A and B. Car A fails less often, kills fewer people overall but none of the failures are due to human mistake. It just speeds up randomly and uncontrollably sometimes and kills whoever is on the way. Engineers have raised their hand that this cannot be fixed for a few years. On the other hand, car B fails only when a human makes a mistake even though its statistically 10X more overall failures per year. Which car society would approve?
redis_mlc 7y ago
This is a fanboy answer: "Planes ARE the safest way to travel: maybe drones are the safest in certain conditions" Western airliners are very safe, but the USA averages one GA accident per day: https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=21274 https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=2... Helicopters have much worse failure modes, even in multi-million dollar aircraft. Small drones are the worst of all, and should not be flown over populated areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_nut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_nut The FAA historically has regulated that aircraft fly 500' and above over non sparsely-populated areas for a reason. Or you lose your license. Drone deliveries fundamentally violate that, as regardless of where your warehouse is located, you're deliberately flying towards a populated area (ie. customers.) The above is why the FAA has justly been slow on allowing drones into the airspace, and why you have to register them. A constructive comment I can add is that I can only see delivery drones being safe with a built-in fixed wing that allows it to glide to the ground power-off below 10 mph. Source: commercially-rated airplane pilot.
- weddpros 7y ago
  347 lives lost per year, or one per million people. Similar to Prion disease fatalities. Sure, that's 3 times more than lightening strikes... but that's still extremely low AND safer than whatever. As for the risk of a plane over a populated area, I think it's safe to say that a 4kg drone is a much lesser threat than a Cessna weighing 200 times more, and that's a very small plane. So it's really not fair to compare a drone crash and a plane crash (we're not talking military drones here, I hope you've read the article). "...I can only see delivery drones being safe with a built-in fixed wing that allows it to glide to the ground power-off below 10 mph": and it seems many people disagree but feel free to prove them wrong and show the world how you can glide a drone to the ground in a dense city to deliver blood at a hospital.
- FDSGSG 7y ago
  GA is very safe too, there are just lots of very unsafe GA pilots.
oldgradstudent 7y ago
Airliners have (2000-2010) 0.2 fatalities per 10 billion passenger-mile. That's passenger-mile - there are tens or hundreds of passenger on each flight. In 2017, UPS had 5 fatalities per 14 billion miles driven, or 3.6 fatalities per 10 billion miles. Given that a UPS truck has tens or hundreds of packages the fatalities per package-mile is much lower. Using UPS would be far safer than using delivery drones, even delivery drones reach the reliability and safety levels of commercial airliners.

TylerE 7y ago

Fit them with ballistic chutes. If you could slow the descent to 10-15mph that'd reduce the potential for damage quite a bit.

sytelus 7y ago
This was the solution in OP article but the 2nd crash happened when chute itself failed.

bigiain 7y ago

It doesn't seem too unreasonable to plan for requiring the drones spend as much as possible of the route they fly take place over places where the risk of dropping them on a person is small. Fly them preferentially over roads/railwaylines/rivers/canals/buildings instead of sidewalks/schools/parks. Require them to be insured for personal and property damage (in much the same way as cars are in many places), have the companies operating them be subject to the same sort of existential threat as Boeing is under right now if they fuck up. I don't think this should be an industry lead by "move fast and break things" style engineering, but I suspect if could usefully exist with a lower regulatory standard/cost than commercial airlines...