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Amazon Tests Delivery Drones At Secret Canada Site After US Frustration
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from The Guardian:
Amazon is testing its drone delivery service at a secret site in Canada, following repeated warnings by the e-commerce giant that it would go outside the U.S. to bypass what it sees as the U.S. federal government's lethargic approach to the new technology. The largest internet retailer in the world is keeping the location of its new test site closely guarded. What can be revealed is that the company's formidable team of roboticists, software engineers, aeronautics experts and pioneers in remote sensing – including a former NASA astronaut and the designer of the wingtip of the Boeing 787 – are now operating in British Columbia. The end goal is to utilize what Amazon sees as a slice of virgin airspace – above 200ft, where most buildings end, and below 500ft, where general aviation begins. Into that aerial slice the company plans to pour highly autonomous drones of less than 55lbs, flying through corridors 10 miles or longer at 50mph and carrying payloads of up to 5lbs that account for 86% of all the company's packages.
Amazon's getting smart with wheeled vehicles delivering to the big cities where flight is impossible, and flying devices to deliver to spread out communities like farm land...
The main problem (well, perhaps not the MAIN problem) I see is that no-one signed up to have drone flights right over their houses. You can buy and plan for where airports are going to be, but the "drone corridors" will just appear overhead one day. Drone sounds are (I think) especially obnoxious buzzing...
It'll be interesting to see if communities try to ban this.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Let's see if we can get DroneCare through Congress.
Table-ized A.I.
https://xkcd.com/1243/
Given the rogue unregulated nature of this airspace they want to exploit, I will claim the airspace over my property as my own and setup a few, ummm, butterfly nets...
eh?
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
seriously good for canada. but on the other hand, thanks alot US government for pushing this outside of our borders Im glad to know that you are keeping us safe from these autonomous delivery overlords.....
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
If the drone confines its flight path to mostly over the road systems it will make a lot less noise than a passing car.
I thought about that too, but the problem is road nose is well contained to buildings on the side of the street, while drone noise is elevated and thus can reach out a lot more.
Perhaps drone noise at 200+ feet would not be as bad as I'm thinking of, but it seems like these would be pretty large drones at 55lbs, thus quite a bit noisier than many of the drones we are used to hearing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Drop them ? Not much worse than how they are currently handled.
I don't get this. What happens when the drone arrives at my address? Does it ring the doorbell and wait? Does it go round the back and leave it on the back porch if I'm out? (I'm in a low-crime neighbourhood where this is possible.) Or will it leave it with my neighbour, as instructed?
But testing? Perfectly legal right now.
Sure, perfectly legal if you make all of your drone research team run out and get a pilot's license, and then file flight plans for every single test. You know, if you take a quadcopter out into the parking lot and hover it ten feet off the ground to test a delivery mechanism, you need an FAA licensed pilot and a filed flight plan for all 30 seconds that will take. Sounds like a really great environment in which to conduct thousands of man hours of testing, huh?
And no, there is no provision in the FAA rules for Amazon to test a single flight where the vehicle goes out of line of site of the hands-on operator. The entire premise of what they're researching is prohibited, barring a waiver that they've only issued to an operator in rural Alaska inspecting pipelines while using existing, military-class equipment.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
(that's Area 51 in American)
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Yes, how dare the US government insist on there being some standards and paperwork for a flying machine that moves at freeway speed, weighs as much as a child, has spinning blades of doom, a battery that can catch fire if poked wrong and will be built by a company that has trouble taping a box closed.
And does nothing to actual develop these standards.
The end goal is to utilize what Amazon sees as a slice of virgin airspace â" above 200ft, where most buildings end, and below 500ft, where general aviation begins.
Yea, I hate to break it to Amazon, but that airspace isn't "virgin", it is currently the domain of helicopters.
Normally, helicopters will fly 500ft above the ground, give or take a bit, but they do not have a lower limit.
FAR 91.119 says "Except when necessary for takeoff or landing, no person may operate an aircraft below the following altitudes..." and it turns out to be illegal to fly an airplane less than 1000' above the rooftops of a city (i.e., about 1200' above the ground) or 500' from any person, vessel, vehicle, or structure in the countryside (i.e., at least 500' above the ground). This is a much closer look than you would get in a commercial airliner, but it isn't all that close. FAR 91.119(d) says "Helicopters may be operated at less than the minimums prescribed in paragraph (b) or (c) of this section if the operation is conducted without hazard to persons or property on the surface."
As long as the helicopter could autorotate to a tennis court, road, or field in the event of an engine failure, the pilot can fly much lower than in an airplane.
Source - Me... I'm a Certified Flight Instructor in both helicopters and airplanes, with thousands of hours of dual given, 2 years spent as a Chief Flight Instructor in a FAA Part 141 school, as well as nearly 10 years of commercial flight experience in tours, offshore, and EMS.
Amazon is out of their mind if they think this is ever going to work. If nothing else, the police and EMS helicopters are not going to get out of their way and they have more of a need to be there.
You forgot about the ease of delivering that 5 pound block of C4 plus detonator to pretty much anybody that ordered it. It isn't even "just" the Amazon drones. Anybody can capture an Amazon drone (or build their own copy and paint it accordingly) and use it to make a "special delivery" to, well, pretty much anyone. "Special Delivery, Mr. President! It's those "books" you ordered from Amazon!"
You can pack a whole lot of evil into 2 kg of C4 (or whatever the latest/greatest compact explosive is) plus detonator. You can saturate any reasonable defensive system by having 100+ drones attempt a delivery at the same time. You can carpet bomb crowded marketplaces - the drone itself will conveniently supply the shrapnel, or you can fly the drones under cars or into glass-front buildings before detonating. And best of all, you can do it in complete anonymity and safety! The drones will be impossible to track back to a point of origin, flying literally under the radar and in numbers too great to track anyway. You can rent a barn or warehouse, ship in as many amazon-a-likes as you can, load them with Sarin, with Anthrax, with weaponized Ebola or with powdered radioactive waste, or -- what the heck -- with all of these at once, to saturate and overwhelm even emergency response systems with multiple distinct threat vectors, and after launching them with a program that directs them to converge on a given target from all directions after initially moving on "delivery" trajectories to a spread of locations, you can just drive away and be "coming downstairs" from your supposedly occupied room in a Days Inn three states away, having your complementary breakfast, before anybody even figures out what might have happened. Me? I was nowhere near Washington at the time, officer. I was upstairs in my motel room in North Carolina, as the records clearly show!
Mind you, all of this is coming anyway. We're a few years away from self-driving cars, which will take the suicide out of suicide bombing by vehicle. It is possible to build anything from a lightweight delivery drone to an actual cruise missile with a 50 or 100 kg payload and built in GPS already, it's just that they are still rare enough that they would stand out and attract notice, at least during the day (at night, would ANYBODY even notice if you painted it flat black and didn't hang any lights on it? I doubt it). I have little doubt that similar devices aren't already in play as vectors for smuggling through our comparatively porous borders, with more coming. Like most techno-genies, this one cannot easily be put back in its bottle once its time arrives, it can only be delayed a bit, perhaps, maybe. Or we can wait until a small fleet of them are used to kill ten thousand or more people all at once the next time the mall in Washington is filled with people for a protest march or an inauguration, or at the superbowl next year. Then we can choose between putting automated chain guns in turrets all around the big sports arenas and downtown DC (and what can go wrong with that, he asks) or making the damn things illegal to own, purchase, manufacture, possess, deploy or talk about loudly in public, which may not stop their use for evil but might slow it down, at least a bit.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
there is no requirement for a pilots liscence. you are totally off base
Yes, there is. The only way you can get a section 333 waiver is if you are a licensed pilot. Period. Here's the existing process:
https://www.faa.gov/uas/legisl...
Their currently proposed rule changes contemplate a simpler grade of permit, but still make no provision for BLOS flight. You'd still need to pass an FAA operator's test, and pay to sit and re-take it every year. The proposed rules also require each and every aircraft to be registered - something that makes flying continually changing prototypes off the work bench a near impossibility.
I'm not "totally off base," I'm aware of the actual situation. You're just engaged in wishful thinking, or making excuses for the administration, and hoping nobody will do any fact checking.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
It doesn't look onerous, other than the fact that the FAA has said they are issuing no such certificates because - other than some mil grade stuff - there is no path to such a certificate currently available. Further, the certification of the aircraft itself has nothing to do with the larger problem: they are allowing NO commercial activity, of any kind (that includes research by companies like Amazon) without operators - each and every one who will be at the controls - having a 333 waiver. And even then, they must be licensed pilot, and have direct control, and line-of-site over the aircraft at all times. In other words, the reason Amazon took all of this activity to Canada is because there is no practical or legal way to do it in the US. For which we have the current administration to thank.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.