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France Becomes First Federal Postal Service To Use Drones To Deliver Mail (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The French postal service is beginning an experimental drone delivery program to deliver parcels on a nine mile route once a week. After the program gets approval from the French aviation regulatory authority, the federal postal service will be the first to ever use drone delivery on a regular route. The drones used in the French postal service experiment have the capacity to fly up to 12 miles carrying about two pounds maximum, going around 19 miles per hour. They are also equipped with parachutes for safe emergency landing in case something disrupts the flight. The eventual goal is to reach rural or mountainous regions that are otherwise difficult and expensive to get to using cars. The drone mail delivery program has been a project of the DPDgroup, Europe's second largest international parcel delivery network, operating as a subsidiary under the French national postal service. The DPDgroup had been working on this program with Atechsys, a French drone company, since 2014 in the south of France. "The first commercial line represents a new step in the program," DPDgroup said in a press release. With the testing phase now over, the experimentation phase is all set to begin. Currently, those participating in the experiment to receive parcels are non-residential, including over ten tech companies. The done routes stretch over the southeastern region of Provence, going between Saint-Maximin-La-Sainte-Beaume and Pourrieres.
With prizes!!!
The USPS union will stop this in the usa!
I guess the drones substitute the snails. Since they are all eaten up.
France does not have a postal service referred to as Federal.
Huh? yes
Big deal. We have hundreds of drones sitting in cubicles writing code here.
France is not a federation, it is a unitary sovereign state.
Laudele lor desigur m-ar mahni peste masura.
2 Pounds, that's quite a few letters. This would be more useful delivering letters than parcels.
Pardon my ignorance, but why is the postal service of France a federal postal service?
Fascinating technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
France is not a Federal Republic
Delivery by drone is nice, but using drones for mail pickup is still a largely unsolved problem.
In how many emergencies will the parachute deploy only to get tangled in the props? Is there a backup parachute for that case? Etc?
Oh you're one of those people. Got it.
I think you mean "The French postal service is beginning an experimental drone delivery program to deliver parcels on a 15 km route once a week."
Le Japanese flag without le blood.
My thoughts exactly. Someone said it's pedantic to make note of this, and one could argue that *because* the error isn't related to the point of the story, the error should be ignored. Perhaps so.
However, it is important that in general people remember that a federal system is *not* a national government like France has. A federal system (compare "federation") has a group of independent states/units who grant the union government powers in specific areas, for specific purposes. The power of a federal government can be at most level with the power of it's members (though member states can delegate *specific areas* to the common government and defer to the federal government in those specified topics.
Speciall deliveuree - a beurmb.
A beurmb? Were we expecteeng weun?
A beurmb, a beurmb!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
he is making America last place in everything!
France is not a federation; it’s an unitary state
This sounds like it would be a dangerous new attack vector for Muslim terrorists. Conceal a nail-bomb in a flying package. Brilliant.
Actually, the french postal service has a history of innovation (e.g. le Minitel), and has handled very cleverly the changes brought by internet (less mail, more packages): they are now the #2 package delivery provider in Europe.
Sending drones instead of people to remote areas is a good idea: there are fewer regulations than in the cities, and it is probably more profitable too than sending people.
The original numbers in the press release:
The French postal service is beginning an experimental drone delivery program to deliver parcels on a 15 kilometre route once a week. [...]The drones used in the French postal service experiment have the capacity to fly up to 20 kilometres carrying 3kg maximum, going around 30 kilometres per hour.
I don't know why Motherboard saw the need to convert these perfectly clear values into units that more than 95% of people have to convert back before they can make sense of them. I do know that they made a mistake in converting the maximum payload.
Meanwhile. All the postal staff are on strike. Drones dont strike. Tho the techs looking after them might.
No way will French workers put up with this nonsense. Look for strikes and sabotage.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Since when is the French postal service a federation?
Meanwhile in Sweden this innovation would be impossible because their dumbfuck laws that classify every drone with a camera as illegal surveillance.