Cobalt wrote:
all jobs accessible without much education, and employing millions which will struggle to find other employment.
The can be re-trained to search and collect the drones shot down by small boys with slingshots 
Or air rifles 
Actually the proof of delivery is not a problem either because loads of stuff gets left in various places. I collected 3 packages today from “other places”, left there over xmas.
The vendor (Amazon) would build a certain % of loss into their margin. Usually that is acceptable in the business sphere (where very few people steal; rather the need for proof of delivery is driven by receiver disorganisation e.g. the package disappears into the receptionist girl’s desk) but I would bet the loss % would be high with this mode of delivery, going mostly into the non-business sphere.
Peter wrote:
Usually that is acceptable in the business sphere…
As I understand it, one of the goods intended to be delivered by drone (but probably not by Amazon themselves) are urgent pharmaceuticals. This kind of product has an acceptable rate of loss of zero percent!
One difference between a drone delivery and a van delivery is that you would have very tight control over the time of delivery. You could text the recipient to say ‘Are you ready for delivery in 5 minutes?’ and 5 minutes after they texted back in the affirmative they could wait outside their house and the drone might appear.
My problem with this proposal is that I don’t immediately see what problem it solves. I can understand that a drone carrying a parcel down from 50k feet could go a long way without using much power but you still have to collect the drone at some point, which means that it will probably have to fly back to a base somewhere – whether that means the mothership or a ground-based station. The range of a drone without a payload isn’t going to be much greater than the range of a drone with a payload. It would mean flying through flight-levels and potentially controlled airspace with all the problems that involves, for relatively little gain.
How many years is a patent valid for, again? I can’t see it becoming a reality much before the patent’s expired. Peter has the best explanation so far.
This kind of product has an acceptable rate of loss of zero percent!
Yeah, but (devil’s advocate here) losing a packet (pun fully intended) is not the same if you know it got lost, because you can re-send it if you don’t get the delivery verification. With normal methods (van driver) you don’t know it got lost until the recipient complains.
OTOH nothing could quickly detect the theft after it was dropped off.
My problem with this proposal is that I don’t immediately see what problem it solves
Immediate gratification is what drives the universe today
The drones would fly at the usual height – say 400ft.
kwlf wrote:
How many years is a patent valid for, again? I can’t see it becoming a reality much before the patent’s expired. Peter has the best explanation so far.
But no present drone technology has the range/endurance, except for very very short range stuff.
How many years is a patent valid for, again?
About 20 years
Similar thinking, minus the blimp.
But no present drone technology has the range/endurance, except for very very short range stuff.
The proposals I read had the airship floating at FL45 so the drones would have to pass through Class C airspace before they got to 400ft.
Fixed wing drones can have a long range – even battery powered ones. Even with a range of just 20 miles you could cover all of London with a limited number of centres. Launching them from a parked HGV would make more sense than an airship.
My r/c helicopter had a nominal endurance of 5 minutes but if you fit large flat-bottomed blades and tune down the rotor RPM and fly at modest speeds of 20-30mph without hovering too much, you can get that up to 20-25 minutes. The limiting factor in reducing the RPM was the tailrotor authority – make it any bigger and it would hit the ground – so if you designed a helicopter to have good endurance it could be considerably better. It was still sporty enough to do loops etc… i.e. more than enough excess power to cart around a small package. And this is ‘off-the-shelf’ using A123 batteries which have a lower energy density than the LiPo batteries most r/c aircraft use.
Launching them from a parked HGV
What’s a HGV?
An HGV is a Heavy Goods Vehicle. A big lorry.
kwlf wrote:
My problem with this proposal is that I don’t immediately see what problem it solves.
I agree. We have a solution, but do we have a problem kind of situation. For this to work it needs to create something new. A new kind of delivery item or something ? No one needed a big screen phone 10 years ago, but today we need it for FB, snapchat, Instagram etc. Things that did not exist in any greater number before we got phones with large screens. It needs a killer app or two, have no idea what that should be.
