By now there is a pretty good chance you’ve heard about Amazons announcement a couple weeks ago in regards to their drone package delivery experiment. I have no doubts that within time it would actually be a really good program for them when it comes to delivering small packages and hopefully they will be able to support all the issues involved in this type of thing. Those of us who have already been in the hobby for sometime are well aware of the potential risks involved with rc helicopters, multi rotors and rc airplanes etc and how badly things can go if your not well prepared to deal with them. There are all sorts of things that can happen with quad copters such as a lipo catching fire, or having the quad fall from the sky which could do quite a bit of damage even if it only weighed something under 8 lbs , or whether it fell on someone or crashed through the window of a house or dropped on vehicles on a road way causing an accident. There are quite a few hobbyists and aerial video professionals who are also well aware of controller boards that have been known to cause the multi rotor to “fly away” and not knowing where in the area it could have possibly ended up which is obviously a pretty expensive loss for some. I recently came across an article that discussed this interesting delivery idea of Amazons where it was mentioned that the drones , a.k.a. the quad copter, could potentially be moved with the delivery vehicle to the particular area of the city where packages would be delivered.
This did begin to make a little more sense to me in that you would have an actual human being in the area with drones to manage their where abouts in the area and to service any potential problems the drones may have. The one thing to think about is, should the quad have a problem , I would assume the machine would just be taken back to the vehicle only to be repaired later. The other question I have to ask is, will this actually help ? or would it reduce the efficiency of the human being by them having to “babysit” the drones before they could move onto to the next delivery? No doubt that there is a team of professionals addressing all types of these concerns who could make the system work. Many countries have in fact banned the use of drones which does cause a problem for Amazon Prime Air. Interestingly Amazon is not the only one delving into this idea of drone deliveries but there are other companies looking into it as well such as DHL.
Probably the only thing that could cause a real problem for these companies is the public in general. There is a video on You Tube that shows a multi rotor that had actually been shot with a gun and has a bullet hole in the frame , in which case the owner of the machine brought their concerns to the local authorities about it but nothing is being done. It is understandable that some people have privacy concerns about drones with cameras on them but you have to admit it is pretty disturbing when someone has the mentality that they need to shoot something that does not belong to them. All in all this is a particular topic that will have a tendency to “drone on” for some time but in a few years time it may become just as acceptable or useful to people as the automobile has become , as well as the cell phone.
Here are a few videos that show examples of drone deliveries :
I hope you have found this article a least a little bit interesting and don’t forget to leave a comment with your thought’s on this.
RC Helimenace 