Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Proposes Dedicated Airspace For Drones
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has published two new position papers which lay out its vision for future drone regulation. Under Amazon's plan, altitudes under 200ft would be reserved for basic hobbyist drones and those used for things like videography and inspection. Altitudes between 200ft and 400ft would be designated for "well-equipped vehicles" capable of operating autonomously out of line of sight. They would need sophisticated GPS tracking, a stable data uplink, communications capabilities with other drones, and sensors to avoid collisions. This, of course, is where Amazon would want to operate its drone delivery fleet. From 400ft to 500ft would be a no-fly zone buffer between the drone airspace and integrated airspace. Amazon's plan also makes room for "predefined low-risk areas," where hobbyists and other low-tech drones can fly higher than the 200ft ceiling. "Additionally, it is Amazon's view that air traffic management operations should follow a 'managed by exception' approach. This means operators are always aware of what the fleet is doing, yet they only intervene in significant off-nominal cases."
That all sounds great, except that helicopter often operate at less than 500 feet above the ground.
What happens when EMS is flying at 300ft and crashes into their delivery drone?
What about law enforcement? Powerline and pipeline patrol? Aerial photography?
All of these things can and do happen at less than 500ft above the ground.
In the North East, they even harvest Christmas Trees off the side of the mountain using helicopters, and that is well under 500ft.
100 feet of buffer is inadequate. How the hell do you measure your AGL when you're flying? You either use a radar altimeter ($25K installed on an airplane worth $20K) or you use the baro altimeter, which has an acceptable calibration error, plus the local altimeter setting (atmospheric pressure) which has an error band, and there's error because you're not right over the reporting station. 1000' is the minimum instrument separation. Bezos just wants to steal a band of airspace. I say give him 0' to 10' AGL, just like a UPS truck.
Government bashes free speech, and then some private agent comes with the wonderful idea of "free speech zone".
I hate what the US have become, it is such that everything is considered "potentially dangerous", and thus need to be banned and/or operate in "controlled" area. Drones accident will happen, just the same way car accident happens, planes accident happens, or even accidental discharge happen (gun are as much subject to mechanical failure as anything else).
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOOOOOO! MOOOOOOOOOOO! Moo cows MOOOOOOOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU COWS!!
100 feet of buffer is inadequate. How the hell do you measure your AGL when you're flying? You either use a radar altimeter ($25K installed on an airplane worth $20K) or you use the baro altimeter, which has an acceptable calibration error, plus the local altimeter setting (atmospheric pressure) which has an error band, and there's error because you're not right over the reporting station. 1000' is the minimum instrument separation. Bezos just wants to steal a band of airspace. I say give him 0' to 10' AGL, just like a UPS truck.
No, but how bout you give him 20-30' so long as he stays over a road, and limit windspeed and weather conditions he can operate in? Sink a billion or so into detecting wires and other obstacles over roadways. Now you've got a second level road and he's flying higher than vehicles but lower than aerial vehicles. It's inefficient compared to full use of airspace but still faster than regular traffic.
The flaws in height-based segmentation of airspace are obvious: you've got to cross through the lower, unregulated height zones to get to the other zones! What zones to they recommend reserving for pistol-equipped drones?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
How about over ISIS
Table-ized A.I.
Sounds great, as long as they don't have to take off or land. The huge amounts of money they will have to spend on sensitive ground radar measurement equipment will be a boon for the economy, and the constant crashing at the border of the two airspaces will make for pleasing entertainment and personal injury lawsuits.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
This is another in a long line of corporate taking.
They want to take a huge swath of public space (the space between 200 and 400 feet across the ENTIRE UNITED STATES) for free, for their benefit and the benefit of the rich who can afford to pay for this-hour delivery, and deliver nothing back to the vast majority of the population.
screw'em
And the worms ate into his brain.
Whatever happens the drones should all speak the same language $@@## should mean always mean up never anything else such as down! or squirrel!
It should be legal to use the interdrone net without licence requirement (for the drone itself or drone operators license is ok) for vital communications.
Personally I vote we take half the CB and use it for the drone to drone communications its not crowded anymore and you can't hear anything on it anyway.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I really don't like this plan. I don't see why anyone would be happy about this. This actually takes away airspace in which recreational drone use is permitted. It's currently up to 400 feet above ground level. There are legitimate reasons for manned flights below that height such as EMS helicopters, crop dusters, etc... That's a reason why the FAA requires keeping drones within view of a observer, because that airspace is shared and will always be shared. Allowing drones to operate outside of the view of an observer is potentially dangerous. It's already dangerous enough when both aircraft have observers to try to avoid collisions. One example was shown on the weather channel's series "why planes crash" when a small passenger plane crashed into a helicopter because neither pilot saw the other aircraft before it was too late to avoid a collision. This is probably exacerbated with a smaller drone that might not have an observer looking out for other aircraft. Amazon's plan seems to add more regulations to recreational drone use while simultaneously seeming to increase the risk of a collision.
Ooh good business writing regulations. (Score:1)
You're so right. Only people who HATE businesses should be recommending regulations. Only people who've never had the energy to organize a croquet game, let alone the biggest retailer in the world, should propose changes to a huge body of regulations. A fine idea.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Helicopters are quiet? Ever heard one of those 'Black Helicopters'? No? I didn't think so!
I once lived near a National Guard heliport. At a base open house I was about 100 yards from a UH-1 Huey and could not hear it. They were demonstrating a Huey gunship quietly staying near infantry that might need support. When called in for support it surprised us as it rose out of the nearby trees and was overhead in seconds. The pilot that dropped off the infantry had masked himself behind terrain and creeped up on us using the tree canopy to absorb the sound of the rotors. As he moved into final position the fuselage was actually in the canopy, the rotors only a few feet above.
...
Did I mention these "one weekend a month" National Guard pilots were Vietnam vets with thousands of flight hours and who had done this sort of thing for real in combat? This was back in the 1970s. I'm sure any Guard pilots that tried something like that today would be grounded and possibly court martialed, but back then
Not only are magnetrons great ISM band fun, but they can overload both receiver front ends and delicate electronics!
And no "stop your shotguns" complaints from neighbors.
Shemya, AK! Go for it.
Just the thought of thousands of drones taking to the air space especially around major cities is just stupid. Its being all about money and frankly the people at Amazon are just people who do not think clearly. Let's hope the FAA realizes that this is disaster on paper, and would surely mean disaster if implemented.
In fact how economical is it to have a drone that can deliver so few packages anyway? You can load up one truck with one driver and deliver a lot of packages.
To pay a person to fly a drone or most likely several drones is not practical logistics. How much logistical infrastructure would have to be devised to track all those drones? Who pays for that? Amazon?
Acceptable margin of error for the identified height detection methods, whereas you could use simpler height detection methods if you were closer to the ground.
As to complex ideas, I fully expect there are lots of legitimate challenges to my proposal that may make it unworkable or that may challenge existing assumptions. That's fine; that's why we propose ideas. So other smart people can tear them down and propose *better* ideas. Or can have their assumptions challenged, like asking questions about how we tell how high off the ground something is.
There is no way it makes sense to let private drones go over Manhattan and not be mostly bound to roads, for example. Medium-sized cities likewise might be able to accommodate a drone infrastructure bound to roads but should probably not be dealing with drones in free-flight. Of course, you might also be able to have drones hook into a cable system once they reach a certain area...
Long ago, when there was an industry making 'office machines', there was an industry association, NOMDA, that by consensus developed a set of regulations and standards that the members, both dealers and manufacturers, adhered to. Mostly. Among the regulations and policies were definitions for such terms as 'used', so that you could be reasonably certain that the typewriter you purchased as 'new' wasn't actually given to a customer as a demo unit, used for a year, given back, cleaned and refurbished, and sold to you as 'new'. This worked fairly well, but NOMDA never took hold with the PC business, and is pretty much done.
Industries can in fact police themselves, if there is sufficient motivation and reward.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Industries can in fact police themselves, if there is sufficient motivation and reward.
Unless it's an open membership organization, you just described a cartel.
Hosts file is for cows! Cows say mooooOOOOOO! Cows fear the power of adblock plus. MOooOOOOooOOOOOOO! HoOOOOOssts say the cows! YOU COWS!!
Uh huh. So Amazon is proposing that they be awarded de facto sole use of airspace from 200-400' (because no one else, especially hobbyists, has TCAS or any of the other carefully selected criteria on their aircraft). Suck it, Bezos.
You've just completely locked out all of the F3 gliding competitions, http://www.fai.org/ciam-our-sp...
How will this work? At the moment I have an intelligent (more or less) human delivery system and even that one is not capable of reading the instructions at the door about where to deposit the package when nobody is present.
(I have 'no-signing needed' contracts with all the delivery companies)
How about if Amazon first would get the "world wide web" thingie right and deliver every item to every country, my local post administration (Luxembourg) has a lucrative automatic system going on where packets for Luxembourg are delivered to a company in a border town in Germany and France and then sent by truck for 5€ to my local post box the very same day. You just register at their website.
For all those hundreds of thousands of vendors that are apparently unable to figure out the shipping costs to deliver outside Germany or France. The other Amazon countries don't seem to have that problem.
There are abuot 87k flights both commercial and private over us skies every day. Since Amazon wouldn't the only drone using company (fed ex , UPS and all other companies) that number could easily go to a million or even ten million. Even if you get five 9s in terms of no-accidents (likely not possible ) that's still 10-100 drones going down a day or 3650-36,500 down a year. All those drones trajectories once they're out of control operate under Newtons Laws . Even if they automatically deploy parachutes (and those work), they're still 40 -100 lbs of "stuff" falling out of the sky onto something somewhere, directed only by wind currents and luck. And that's a best case scenario.
This is what my crude back of the napkin yet fact-based maths tell me. I would love to hear well reasoned, fact- based counter arguments
Of course it was open membership.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
No entity with commercial interests or rather: with interests other than those of a democratically elected government or it's air authority organization shall have anything to say on the use of airspace. That's much too important for all of us. Just imagine those dickheads making a proposal for a special delivery lane for their trucks between lanes for cars and bikes on the road... The private sector already has got too much control over the electromagnetic spectrum and such.
To be clear: fuck off, Amazon.
This is in some ways similar to what happened to the radio spectrum. Large swaths are only licensed to commercial enterprises to broadcast trash while amateurs got squeezed into narrow slices here and there. No. Reserve 200-300 ft along well-defined corridors for commercial delivery services and leave the rest for amateurs.
The stuff I want from Amazon isn't going to be in stock within a 500 mile radius anyhow. I don't need tacos delivered by air.
While RC gliders are not drones I am concerned that they be clumped into these drone restrictions. DLG RC gliders are 1.5m sailplanes without motors. They are thrown like a discus with a peg in the wing to hold onto for the spin and release. They do have servos to control the surfaces but they do not have a motor to propel them. Once they are thrown you must search for thermals to keep them up and go higher. Top DLG RC pilots can throw them 240 to 280 feet right from the ground which is already over their highly restrictive limit. It is ridiculous that some commercial company comes by and tries to dictate that we now must fly below 200 feet so that they can use the space above that for their commercial drone use.
Our club routinely gets 5,000-15,000 foot waivers for medium-to-high-power launches, and it doesn't stop nimrods from flying over the launch area in general aviation aircraft.
Low-power sport rocketry (think the little Estes hobby-shop rockets) can hit the 2,000 foot level without too much sweat.
I'm tired of seeing available airspace disappear every time I turn around. The fields in which I launched as a kid are completely off-limits - noplace in the close-in metro DC area can you launch a model rocket legally.
A drone is supposed to be an unmanned aircraft that can fly autonomously. RC model airplanes/helicopters can be designed or equipment added to make them fit that description but most RC model aircraft do not fit that description at all and are not drones. RC Model aircraft tend to be flown within the visual line of sight and always actively controlled the entire time by the RC pilot while watching the airspace around them. Drones on the other hand have features that allow the drone to take over controls at times and some can be flown out of the controllers sight either by GPS waypoints or FPV.
People flying RC model aircraft can see a big patch of sky at once when higher up. We can hear commercial airplanes or helicopters and see them coming even at 5000 feet and above (I have never flown more than 2500 feet) so even if we were to be close to their path we can easily move away from their path in plenty of time to avoid any issues. It is really a non-issue unless someone deliberately wanted to cause problems (which legislation couldn't stop anyway). I have been flying RC since 1992 even around my home up to 2400 feet and have never been anywhere near the path of a commercial helicopter or airplane and I live near the city. I never fly when I hear an aircraft approaching. If you are up flying then any low (300 to 800 feet) commercial aircraft you can hear way ahead of time and bring it down or move it far away from them before they get close. Most other airplanes are in the 5000 feet range where I live. I tend to fly my motorless Discus Hand Launch Glider (DLG) usually around 150 to 1500 feet (when I catch thermals). At that altitude you can see and still hear airplanes approach miles away and easily not be anywhere near them when they approach overhead just in case they are around your RC model's altitude.
I have been flying RC model aircraft since 1992 and the biggest trouble spot that I can think of is drones (or RC model aircraft) that are flown via first person view (FPV) far away from the viewer or up high. People looking at a video monitor or video goggles have a much harder time seeing other objects around them. People tend to fly them much further away too (some are flying them miles away). While a few more expensive models have a VR type control to move your head left/right/up/down to look around while flying, that still is not as good as viewing from the ground and always keeping the model within eye sight from the ground so that you (or a friend) can look out for other air traffic. Some are only flown within line of sight so it shouldn't be a problem but for those flying further away it can be an issue.
How many people has Amazon murdered compared to the us government?
Of course that's *legitimate* murder so it's okay!
Exactly. If this served anything but Amazon's profiteering, maybe. But give me a break. What whiny bitch Amazon is.
Why is it considered automatic that commercialized drones as a concept is a good thing and will just be approved? Oh, because the United States is actually a Corporatocracy now. Forgot that....