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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

Why are you downvoted? Safety is a thousand times more concerning - the drones will mechanically fail, they will hit bad weather, they will collide with birds, there will be new drone delivery market entrants and will need coordination across systems... If a drone fails at an expected operating altitude, it can kill someone easily on the ground. If it fails at height over a highway, what if it kills a bus driver or causes a tractor trailer to lose control? What if they hit electric lines? What else can go in flight corridors at the same altitudes? Do they container chemicals or voltages that first responders have to be aware of?

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There's a reason why it's taking so long for Amazon to get FAA approval for drone delivery and this is exactly why. There are people in important places asking these sorts of questions already.

My guess personally, is that drone delivery will ultimately just be a tool for a self driving truck to get the package from the truck to the door. Drones are not nearly good enough as it stands today to do end to end deliveries at an industrial scale outside of maybe a few rural areas.

The same people in important places that approved the 737 Max?

Yes ... so they have experience in crashing planes, which is relevant. /s

In the sense that they are human, yes. Even in the sense that they work for the government, which narrows the pool to 20,000,000+

But also, no. Not the same people.

I get your point but the relevant agency division FAA AVS employees 7,200 people [0]. Fewer than that are involved in certifying aircraft safety. Agencies like all other human groups have cultures.

[0] https://www.faa.gov/about/plans_reports/congress/media/fy17_...

Wasn't a critical issue with 737 MAX that incumbent manufacturers are able to self-certify equivalency without any review?

So, to the extent the Boeing 737 MAX team is not reviewing Amazon's applications, no, not the same people.

I don't think people fully appreciate the carefulness with which the FAA has approached this, nor the full scope of the scenarios they have considered.

If you look at the first FAA waivers to operate drones industrially -- 5 years ago! -- you will notice that all of the approved drones are military drones. Why military drones? Because the approved drones often had a decade or more of operational use in explicitly hostile environments and very poorly controlled conditions. Being able to reliably operate in those conditions was considered strong evidence they were unlikely to start falling out of the sky when operated under much better controlled environments and less risky conditions.

The challenge for many new drone builders is that their platforms are not built anywhere close to the reliability and resilience standards of military drone systems, which are typical the product of companies with proven aviation/avionics systems engineering experience and bankrolled by US defense spending. Even when they build systems that on paper meet this level of engineering, the lack of operational history and experience puts these drones on the slow path to approval.

Amazon getting the FAA to sign off on industrial use of an exotic drone airframe with no operational history strongly suggests that its safety and resilience characteristics are excellent, at least comparable to drones designed to survive military environments.

The comment is uninteresting and rightly downvoted because (1) it's been discussed to death and has nothing to do with this particular experimental drone model and (2) we already have effective legal apparatuses to deal with liability.

Neither of those are reasons to not discuss this more. We, as a society, prevent all sorts of things from happening without having to just wait for a lawsuit to settle things or whatever.

One has to actually make an argument for the liability system being insufficient. Merely pointing out risks is not enough, especially since no one here has bothered to even do an order-of-magnitude comparison between the risks and the benefits. It's just noise and emoting.

Benefits: You get your stuff quicker from Amazon

Risks: See everything else

Do you really, like I mean _really_ need your stuff from Amazon same day, hours after ordering it? No, you really don't. Nobody does. It's a convenience, a nice-to-have, but is totally unnecessary.

So, I think the burden of proof lays squarely on Amazon and it's proponents of this type of service, to prove beyond any reasonable doubt the risks can be mitigated to the point where the public accepts them as a trade-off.

Having potentially 50lbs of drone fall on your car while you're driving home from work is probably not going to be acceptable... to name just one risk that will have to be proven to be minimized. Or noise levels will be controlled near neighborhoods etc... Other industries have to prove their new thing is safe and acceptable for the public... why should Amazon be any different?

Yes, that's an excellent imitation of the sort of comment of I was complaining about.

> Do you really, like I mean _really_ need your stuff..hours after ordering it? No, you really don't..It's a convenience

The same could be asked of 2-day home-delivery 20 years back, or 2-day world-travel 200 years back. Yet, here we are.

If necessity is the mother of invention, laziness is the father.

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