Comment by weddpros | Hacker News Reader

Comment by weddpros | Hacker News Reader

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This is an emotional answer: "any failure...potential... large weight... person... show stopper". That's emotions speaking, we need probabilities and reason instead (because a delivery truck should trigger the same fear with you but it doesn't).

Planes ARE the safest way to travel: maybe drones are the safest in certain conditions, like for these urgent hospital deliveries in Switzerland, or in dangerous/isolated settings. And maybe drones will become safer and safer, like with parachutes in the article.

Okay the parachutes will need Dyneema strings instead of simple ones, just like parachutes were used before Dyneema was invented. Oh wait, someone's working on Dyneema parachutes for drones: https://www.textilemedia.com/latest-news/mobiletex/drone-par...

As you can see, there's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Find how you can save lives and make the world better, not how to use emotions to exert power and kill Freedom. The world needs innovation more than ever, be it electronic cigarettes or self driving cars or drones.

This is a fanboy answer: "Planes ARE the safest way to travel: maybe drones are the safest in certain conditions"

Western airliners are very safe, but the USA averages one GA accident per day:

https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=2...

Helicopters have much worse failure modes, even in multi-million dollar aircraft. Small drones are the worst of all, and should not be flown over populated areas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_nut

The FAA historically has regulated that aircraft fly 500' and above over non sparsely-populated areas for a reason. Or you lose your license.

Drone deliveries fundamentally violate that, as regardless of where your warehouse is located, you're deliberately flying towards a populated area (ie. customers.)

The above is why the FAA has justly been slow on allowing drones into the airspace, and why you have to register them.

A constructive comment I can add is that I can only see delivery drones being safe with a built-in fixed wing that allows it to glide to the ground power-off below 10 mph.

Source: commercially-rated airplane pilot.

347 lives lost per year, or one per million people. Similar to Prion disease fatalities. Sure, that's 3 times more than lightening strikes... but that's still extremely low AND safer than whatever.

As for the risk of a plane over a populated area, I think it's safe to say that a 4kg drone is a much lesser threat than a Cessna weighing 200 times more, and that's a very small plane. So it's really not fair to compare a drone crash and a plane crash (we're not talking military drones here, I hope you've read the article).

"...I can only see delivery drones being safe with a built-in fixed wing that allows it to glide to the ground power-off below 10 mph": and it seems many people disagree but feel free to prove them wrong and show the world how you can glide a drone to the ground in a dense city to deliver blood at a hospital.

GA is very safe too, there are just lots of very unsafe GA pilots.

Probabilities and stats are actually incomplete and naive way people justify human deaths. Let's say you hit another car and kill another driver because you were texting. This would lead to perhaps prison, heavy fines and taking you off the road to prevent future incidence. However, cars themselves would not get banned. Now imagine the accident was because of car malfunction and not your mistake. What would happen? You guessed right: that models of cars would be taken away from the road.

Now here's a thought experiment: Let's say humans have a choice of only two models of cars: A and B. Car A fails less often, kills fewer people overall but none of the failures are due to human mistake. It just speeds up randomly and uncontrollably sometimes and kills whoever is on the way. Engineers have raised their hand that this cannot be fixed for a few years. On the other hand, car B fails only when a human makes a mistake even though its statistically 10X more overall failures per year. Which car society would approve?

Airliners have (2000-2010) 0.2 fatalities per 10 billion passenger-mile. That's passenger-mile - there are tens or hundreds of passenger on each flight.

In 2017, UPS had 5 fatalities per 14 billion miles driven, or 3.6 fatalities per 10 billion miles. Given that a UPS truck has tens or hundreds of packages the fatalities per package-mile is much lower.

Using UPS would be far safer than using delivery drones, even delivery drones reach the reliability and safety levels of commercial airliners.

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