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Comment by paul7986 | Hacker News Reader

So in the pic it carries one package?

So the sky is going to be littered with drones delivering packages in ten to 20 years? Present day that seems ridiculous and unattractive!

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I'm sure they said the same things about planes and cars some 100 years ago.

They may not have been wrong about cars. Probably not planes either for people living near takeoff/landing flight paths...

I lived under the flight paths near LAX for awhile. It was incessant and obvious, all the time. Aircraft engines are hard to ignore and they would rattle the windows (which were sound resistant). One of my goals in life is to never live somewhere like that again. It isn't bad until you live under a major one, then you realize it can be a constantly present annoyance.

Whoever said it about cars was right.

Better than horses loitering around everywhere, right?

Cars are definitely much more common in cities now that horses were around, say, 1900. Most people just walked.

Cars also seem to have exerted a much greater impact in terms of getting cities to design themselves primarily around themselves (probably because of that popularity).

I’m a researcher working in this field. Believe me when I tell you that at least in the US we are very concerned with the nuisance these things may pose. If we do our job well, these will be no more of a nuisance than helicopters and airplanes today.

It would be a good idea to use better standards for noise pollution than helicopters and airplanes of today.

Perhaps like this - Life in the Spanish City that banned cars. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/sep/18/paradise-life...

This is about how much noise your aircraft are allowed to create. What you should be able to hear in the street are the tweeting of birds in the camellias, the tinkle of coffee spoons and the sound of human voices.

Hopefully driverless vehicles can make this redundant. I'd prefer quiet electric robots zipping around the streets to noisy drones in the air.

What problem is drone delivery actually solving? How often are people sitting at home and need a delivery dispatched right now. Food delivery seems to be the only compelling use case. Maybe the occasional "out of toilet paper" emergency?

Or perhaps on demand delivery becomes so easy that it changes people's behaviour to JIT all their shopping.

Autonomous drone delivery "solves" many of the issues when compared to having the FedEx/UPS truck and a driver drive to my location, not the least of which is the small army of locally-based drivers who want to be paid in local wages.

Depending on who you ask, driverless vehicles are either right around the corner, or 5-10 years away. Meanwhile, drone delivery is possible, right now, and the airspace above my house is generally empty. (It's being done "in prod" for medicine delivery in Rwanda. iirc those are not autonomous though.)

Like delivery options that exist now, I wouldn't expect drone delivery to be instantaneous either.

The issue with an eVTOL is that you have an unobstructed noise source at altitude. Cities are not designed for this.

In a well-designed city noise sources would be under the ground or at a ground level, behind a sound barrier. They wouldn't be placed at altitude.

I could see the sound of high pitched drone motors going overhead being a pain.

It wouldn't be the first time we littered the skies of our cities with delivery technology, although it was for message deliver rather than goods delivery [1].

[1] https://io9.gizmodo.com/photos-from-the-days-when-thousands-...

If they run them over roads, I honestly don't think it will be a big problem.

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