Quote:
Originally Posted by HardDrive
The density is there to support it, but think of the air currents around tall buildings on a windy day. Also, there is a ton of both foot and car traffic, only a matter of time before a drone comes down in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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That is absolutely part of the issue in urban areas...the safety aspect as well as air vehicle performance parameters and environmental concerns: Wind, rain, snow, etc. NYC in the winter? Good luck.
I absolutely support commercial drones and drone delivery, it just does not pencil out in certain use cases. It generally comes down to a few factors:
- Purchase and maintenance of a new system; the drone and the drone infrastructure, including operator training, is not an insignificant cost. Any delivery system with a payload capacity over 5lbs is going to be a big air vehicle with a significant logistics tail. Training is a large obstacle and expensive.
- Insurance. Think in terms of a VTOL delivery drone hitting a wire and knocking out power or causing structural damage. We can all extrapolate from there...and that is before any personal injury concerns, etc. The legal pot holes facing the drone delivery companies will be difficult to patch over.
- Customer acceptance. There is a large segment that want nothing to do with drone delivery. So, in essence, without wide spread customer support the delivery company has to maintain two delivery methodologies, the old and the new. That has been a significant hurdle.
- Regulatory issues. Visual flight rules, beyond line of sight flight, airspace concerns, hazardous material (batteries)...the list goes on and often for the exact right reasons. Think General Aviation without regulations.
- Availability. When we would bid commercial drone jobs, we treated the job like a flight schedule in the Navy: Flight scheduled, flight flown, cancellation reasons (weather, a/v maintenance, sensor performance, etc.). We found that we flew, after adjusting for our learning curve, around 70% of revenue flights scheduled. The key statistic here is that you still have to delivery the package on time as promised. So, again, the maintenance of the old capability (trucks and vans that, btw, can be rented in high use package delivery times) and the new, now sitting idle, is going to be a barrier.
The above is just the start. Aviation is hard, especially for small drones: We shrunk the aircraft we did not shrink the world. Sounds trite but it is real. Again, I support drone use as much as possible as we overcome some of the issues I listed.