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Actually, contention for air space wouldn't be that bad. Modern airplanes have a pressure transponder which announces your flight id and the air pressure at yo

Actually, contention for air space wouldn't be that bad. Modern airplanes have a pressure transponder which announces your flight id and the air pressure at your location. From which you can determine a direction, id, and altitude. Create an automated ATC, some simple separation rules (100' vertical, 500' horizontal), and order that drones flying east are on odd multiples of 100', westbound flights on even multiples. You know where thing is and where it's going. Maybe add in some prohibited zones around airports or tall buildings and you are pretty much done.

snogglethorpe 13y ago
The thing is, if this idea proves viable, there are going to be (or at least there will be demand for) many orders of magnitude more of these than there are traditional types of air vehicles... And because of the very short range, much of that will probably be in dense urban areas (so it won't be anything like evenly distributed). So... I dunno if traditional approaches to avoiding airspace contention will work so well...
- Plasmoid 13y ago
  Perhaps, but would the air traffic be any worse than road traffic? Say you had 5 flight levels each direction, so 10 'levels' in all. Would we have more than an order of magnitude more flight traffic than road traffic? I would argue no.
  - chongli 13y ago
    Would we have more than an order of magnitude more flight traffic than road traffic? I would argue no. We might. This sort of disruptive innovation could be staggering in scope. I could imagine putting in an order for a weekly grocery bill and having dozens of drones deliver the items from all over the place. Currently, we have an infrastructure that assumes we'll ship myriad items to a centralized clearing house (hub topology). It'd actually be far more efficient to eliminate this redundant, single point of failure and build something more akin to a mesh network. Items such as locally grown produce may even be shipped directly from farm to doorstep.
mzs 13y ago
What about N and S? What about manned experimental aircraft? What about unmanned RC aircraft?

snogglethorpe 13y ago

The thing is, if this idea proves viable, there are going to be (or at least there will be demand for) many orders of magnitude more of these than there are traditional types of air vehicles... And because of the very short range, much of that will probably be in dense urban areas (so it won't be anything like evenly distributed). So... I dunno if traditional approaches to avoiding airspace contention will work so well...

Plasmoid 13y ago
Perhaps, but would the air traffic be any worse than road traffic? Say you had 5 flight levels each direction, so 10 'levels' in all. Would we have more than an order of magnitude more flight traffic than road traffic? I would argue no.
- chongli 13y ago
  Would we have more than an order of magnitude more flight traffic than road traffic? I would argue no. We might. This sort of disruptive innovation could be staggering in scope. I could imagine putting in an order for a weekly grocery bill and having dozens of drones deliver the items from all over the place. Currently, we have an infrastructure that assumes we'll ship myriad items to a centralized clearing house (hub topology). It'd actually be far more efficient to eliminate this redundant, single point of failure and build something more akin to a mesh network. Items such as locally grown produce may even be shipped directly from farm to doorstep.

mzs 13y ago

What about N and S? What about manned experimental aircraft? What about unmanned RC aircraft?