FAA authorizes Zipline to deliver commercial packages using drones | Hacker News Reader

FAA authorizes Zipline to deliver commercial packages using drones

faa.gov

525 pointsgok440 comments

A video from Mark Rober about Zipline, to get an idea. I was very impressed when I first heard of them.

> when your lunch only weighs a few ounces, delivering it in 2-ton gas powered vehicles is wildly inefficient

Seems absurd when it's put like that. This is possibly something we'll look back on and struggle to comprehend how it was ever the go-to solution.

The size of these vehicles is certainly absurd, but flying packages with drones that consume most of their energy to fight gravity does not seem particularly efficient either, (e.g. compared to small road electric vehicles with the same payload, which would have its own practical problems).

Sure but there's a tradeoff with ground transport. A drone can make the trip with much shorter traveled distance and potentially higher speed, resulting in higher utilization per vehicle. It also doesn't interfere with road traffic, which could have externalities in longer idle time for other vehicles at intersections and whatnot.

Both are better than Garret in his 2007 Ford Explorer driving around town all day delivering timbits and tacos.

> resulting in higher utilization per vehicle

A van can hold thousands of 2-ounce packages, whereas a drone can hold one. If you look at it in terms of a one-package utilization rate, a van has over 100% rate, because it holds multiple packages, in fact it may have over a 1000% utilization rate using that metric.

You're essentially wasting tons of energy and resources getting very small packages delivered faster, but in urban setting there are no efficiencies here, quite the contrary.

Garret’ll get there in a hurricane though

Timbits and Tacos sounds like an amazing D&D parody.

The existence of migratory birds proves that the loss of energy due to the Earth's gravitational pull is not so catastrophic. A vehicle in motion also loses energy because of the friction of the wheels. Above a certain speed, air friction becomes the most significant loss. The comparison of the energy balance of a vehicle on the road compared with a vehicle in the air is not as clear-cut. Vehicles on wheels are much heavier and require infrastructure (roads) that must be taken into account.

You may have noticed that migratory birds have a somewhat different mechanism of flight than typical drones.

If you were to ask a migratory bird, they'd tell you that it's fairly tough. You have to put on enough subcutaneous fat to double your body weight, and then do it knowing that either you or some of your friends and family will die.

Yes, but how does the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow compare to that of one delivering a coconut?

The actual harm from the drone's wasted energy is pretty negligible aside from the waste heat itself, though, as compared to the many, many side effects of road vehicles of any kind (for example, just starting with the air pollution from tire particles).

Of course, that equation changes a bit once there are enough drones that noise pollution and collisions or other incidents become a real issue.

Noise pollution and collisions are a much, much larger problem with cars, since they're constrained to two dimensions while drones can use three. Plus, cars tend to kill people when they collide with each other (or with pedestrians), and drones would not. Hopefully they will all use engineered quiet propellers (such as Zipline uses) and electric engines (similarly).

Where I live we can get deliveries by starships https://www.starship.xyz/. The vehicles are kind of cute when you see them in action.

They've been working on those things in Tallinn for years, and I've only ever seen them operate in a very limited area, and even then it's not unusual to see them seemingly stuck at the nearby rail crossing. Meanwhile a human on a Bolt scooter ate their and their investor's lunch IMO.

They do look cute, I remember being completely taken-aback the first time I saw one in the wild - I had to resist the temptation to stand in front of it, to see what would happen.

Though I did wonder how they'll cope in winter-weather. I can't imagine they'd do so well on snow/ice.

They've been using them in Milton Keynes too: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/apr/12/robots-deliv...

Also DPD piloted something similar in Milton Keynes and is now going to do it i ten towns in the UK: https://green.dpd.co.uk/news/16

Ok that seems like far more practical idea

Aircraft are more energy efficient then cars[1] at scale. But even a light plane like a Cessna 172 does 13L/100KM[2] depending on flight speed. Certainly more then my Prius, but it can take a much more direct route too.

There's also the simple practical issue: self-driving cars can't navigate a complex crowded environment, whereas self-flying planes navigate a much simpler environment with many more regulatory controls on behavior.

[1] https://www.sustainablebusiness.com/2014/02/surprisingly-air...

[2] https://www.flyouts.com/vliegtuig/cessna-172

I lost confidence at the very beginning of the article:

> In fact, unless you drive a car that gets 33.8 gallons per mile (or carry more than one passenger), new airplanes coming off the assembly line are more fuel-efficient

Cars typically get about 0.03 gallons per mile, so it’s not even close.

> Aircraft are more energy efficient then cars[1] at scale.

Some aircraft and definitely not drons for now.

If Prius was adapted to run optimally on extremely high octane leaded fuel what could it get?

It's been studied; drones are somewhat better: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02411-5

E-bike courriers are probably better still but drones are probably faster if you can make them work.

A lot depends on the delivery pattern, of course.

Nice thing about drones is they're unlikely to kill anyone if they crash, and they're not sharing the roads with cars in the first place.

In some places, bikes are first-class citizens of the road, but in other places they're very much not respected and riding one is tantamount to suicide. Every single cyclist I know, when they meet another cyclist, immediately asks about gnarliest injuries and they compare scars like dogs sniffing each other's butts. And in the past 20 years I've lost more friends to cycling fatalities than any other cause of death.

I'll take the drones, thankyouverymuch.

Ideally you'd use little remote controlled electric cars, but driving on the ground is a MUCH more complex problem.

With a sufficient number of drones in the air simultaneously, this becomes a far more difficult problem.

Drones schmones.

Miniature zeppelins is where it’s at. Bouyancy to just below negative so very little energy needed to lift the device.

It is still a trade-off - you end up fighting drag, potentially for much longer than a regular drone.

There are other things you need energy for. Such as overcoming wind and rain.

https://www.starship.xyz/

In a crime-free utopia, they could be useful. Or maybe within a large corporate campus type environment.

But 'on the streets' in the real world, they're just targets for vandalism and theft.

Those look perfect for campus delivery applications.

OK, what about if our supermarkets are actually really tall buildings, and the drones glide down from the distribution platform on the top floor...

That sounds pretty much the same as existing "catolog stores"[0] like Argos[1] (although your idea is probably a bit more automated).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalog_merchant

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argos_(retailer)

Bikes for local rapid delivery are hard to beat.

This might be news to some people, but there are other modes of transportation / delivery than 2-ton cars. "2-ton cars vs. flying drones" is a false dichotomy.

Indeed, they are ignoring the much more efficient and eco-friendly "low-paid worker on a bike" alternative.

This is a policy problem, not a tech problem. People need to be paid a living wage, period. The lack of this and the subsidizing of delivery fees by VC money has led people to believe it's somehow sustainable to sit on your lazy ass, order food and have it delivered within 30 min for next to nothing. Or maybe people know that it's not sustainable but just don't give a shit. Greedy corporations and unethical people will always exists, that's why we need better laws.

Or the even more efficient and eco-friendly "make and bring your own lunch", but somehow this isn't considered, instead it's a long thread of drones vs cars vs mopeds and low-wage delivery people.

Or low-paid worker on a moped, which is very common around the world, though maybe less desirable in America's suburbia.

Also low-paid worker sounds strictly better for employment than autonomous drone.

Are delivery people that drive cars that well paid?

But you have to take into account the low-paid worker’s environmental impact! You can’t beat an autonomous EV’s eco-friendliness. /s

Starship robots come to mind as well.

As with everything, that greatly depends on where you live.

Sure, but I'd wager most of food delivery happens in cities, not in rural areas. We know how to build pedestrian and bike friendly cities.

Maybe we should be asking why we order a few-ounce lunch at all?

There was a time when ordering lunch was reserved for when you were already "on the town" shopping and the like.

Even debating what mode of transportation should be used seems to miss the larger issue and is even kind of gross to my mind.

Agreed. Something I commonly observe, which I’m guilty of too, is getting so excited about technological innovation that we can’t see the forest for the trees. I get that the idea of being able to order a sub sandwich on a whim and have it delivered directly to you via a drone is really cool, but why not plan ahead and bring it with you? One could also go to a sandwich shop next to where they work. My coworkers and I would walk to the sandwich shop next to our office once per week when I still worked in an office. Seems remarkably less wasteful and more efficient all around.

I don’t see it ever happening, but I’m not even sure we need package delivery available for anything every day of the week. If we limited it to once per week for bulkier items (such as large furniture), we could reduce a lot of waste and traffic. Rather than deliver tiny lunches via drone, perhaps we should reconsider the greater idea of ordering objects. As someone without a car in a car-dependent city, it’s certainly on my mind.

And this doesn’t expand into societal implications of ordering everything without interacting with other humans. That’s perhaps a more interesting conversation!

I struggle with it already. It hurts seeing it.

And I live in such a lovely city. I can bike anywhere so quickly, so easily. Scooters & micromobility are abundant. But so many people (so many roommates over time) make a habit of ordering delivery, on such a regular basis. It's unfathomable to me: both the negative impact in general, and particularly here where it's so close & pleasant to go walk or bike around. It's such a huge expense to the world, and such a great enriching activity, getting a little walkabout.

Not everyone bikes or uses scooters. I don't. But, if I'm in a city, I'll certainly walk someplace rather than getting a food delivery which I haven't had since... I really couldn't tell you when.

When I was in the city, I'd order delivery from the restaurants on our street. The waiter would just walk up, and hand the food to me.

Delivery apps just made people get food from a larger variety of places. Before them, you'd order from the pizzaria that's on the route home, and pick up up before jumping back on the subway. Or you'd eat at the diner on your block.

Speaking as someone who just goes downstairs and makes a sandwich, or who takes some to work, ordering lunch seems absurd to me. Is it that cheap in the US / do you earn that much? Food culture is so weird over there.

It's not cheap. When I still worked in the city, I was always blown away by how much of their salary most of my coworkers were willing to spend on restaurant lunches every day.

Typically I would expect a restaurant lunch in a major city in the US to cost $20-$40 per person after taxes and tip.[1] So, essentially $5,000 - $10,000/year. This was for people with salaries running from about $50,000 - $200,000 before income tax, so something like 7% - 20% of their after-tax income.

Making a lunch and bringing it instead should be less than half of that, especially if one makes extra food for dinner and brings the leftovers for lunch the next day, but I guess a lot of people actively dislike cooking for themselves.

A decent amount of tech workers also get dinner at restaurants nearly every day, which is of course even more expensive.

[1] Excluding inexpensive franchises like McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, because my coworkers typically did not get lunch at places like that.

When I worked in the city Chinatown was pretty cheap but I agree in general. Going out every day, especially for a reasonably healthy lunch, adds up.

I see a dichotomy... many colleagues bring lunches to work in e.g. glass microwaveable containers, but many have an "ick" abt prepping their own food. A huge "tax" on the lazy.

Compared to the richest countries like Norway or Switzerland it's cheap.

Compared to everywhere else, Americans make more.

In the so called "developing" countries, delivery app deliveries are mostly on light motor bikes and even ebikes.

According to zipline[1] it is still better than motorcycles at least. Considering we are talking about 100km, I would not consider a bicycle an option for such small packages.

That said for me delivering a package by bicycle+ train + bycycle is an option but it will always be more expensive unless you can stand long delivery times.

[1] https://www.flyzipline.com/newsroom/stories/research-insight...

The vast vast majority of couriers in NYC are on e-bikes or mopeds.

At least a delivery vehicle is amortizing by delivering multiple lunches to multiple people in a single trip. When someone drives themselves to lunch, they’re using a 2-ton vehicle for a single lunch.

Delivery vehicles for packages aren’t traveling very far between stops. A 2 ton vehicle dropping off 200 packages on a 100 mile delivery route is averaging 0.5 miles per package and 0.125 kWh where a drone might need to fly 15 miles each way per packages = 30 miles to and from some central hub to do those same routes. Drones are light, but 0.125 kWh to fly 30 miles seems unlikely.

Food delivery might be a better comparison, but 2 pizzas and a 2 liter soda is heavy enough to need a fairly massive drone.

The drone would still be the better option. Electric motors and propellers don't produce any pollution, unlike combustion engines and/or car tyres.

And of course the obvious part where it removes hundreds of thousands of vans from already massively congested road traffic. The skies remain mostly unused.

Drones aren’t necessarily electric, and cars can be EV so that doesn’t favor one over the other.

Pollution wise you need to consider the lifecycle of a drone which is likely far worse than a van. Many drones are using very dirty small internal combustion engines. Safety wise replacing 1 van with 30+ heavy drones each traveling far more could easily favor the van.

Delivering single boxes of lunch in two ton vehicles isn't really common anywhere in the world outside of the US and maybe a handful more countries.

Most of the work use mopads/motorcycles for delivery. A lot more efficient than cars.

Here in India a lot of delivery services moved to electric 2 wheelers

Single meal delivery as an institution is wildly inefficient. The absurd inefficiency of the car as delivery vehicle does not make drones a meaningfully wiser choice.

For every proposed technology, we need desperately to ask: does this really make ecological sense?

Delivering necessities (e.g. medicine) to a remote township with a drone makes sense. Drone-drop pizzas do not.

That's because it is absurd. The same way any convenience is absurd.

Most of the deliveries around the world are done by motorbikes though, not only that but they are done not one at a time but in big chunks. Which is not absurd and pretty good.

Sorry for being an annoying biker - but only if we built communities where deliveries could happen on human-powered <50kg vehicles.

No, let's instead try to game the superlinear scaling of power to weight in helicopters!

Now if only robots could make the lunches too. Or wait, just replace the humans in need of delivery with robots or AI. Disruption!

To be fair, it's almost certainly delivered by a motorcycle.

But that's still hundreds of kilograms.

This is why bike delivery is ideal.

Quick tangential question: I watched a few seconds that video and was immediately struck by how Mark sounds so....YouTube'ey? What is it about his intonation and narration style that is so distinctly YouTube? I don't watch enough YouTube to get a sense for whether it's distinct to him or to an entire class of popular channels. Every sentence or two is a "quip" - it's loud and sing-song'y. Lots of phrases seem to end on a rising tone (my parents used to call this "upspeak?" because it sounds like you're asking a question? all the time?).

Where/when did this style arise?

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/the-l...

TLDR: They use various ways of emphasizing words and adding variety to speech. It's almost exclusively done in videos where it's just a face talking to camera to try to make it attention grabbing.

They use Jon Stewart's Daily Show as a pre- YouTube example of someone using the same techniques for the same reasons.

Oh fascinating - great find. Thank you! I like in particular the phrase "intellectual used-car-salesman voice" (LOL).

ps - for those who are not subscribers: https://archive.ph/wkiWt

Interesting thanks for the link. I was a college radio dj and there is a similar thing for when people are speaking on-air. It's kind of strange to be in a basement alone talking into a mic, especially because people are listening! Makes me think of sports broadcasting mannerisms across different cultures/languages.

This is an interesting observation. I had a similar observation about tik tok influencer speak, though it’s not the same style as YouTube speak. There is a distinct shared way of speaking I’ve just called the tik tok accent (not talking about the AI voiceover). It’s something I’ve noticed mostly with female influencers, where they talk in a lower, quieter voice, that feels both like they are educating as well as perhaps infantilizing the listener. It’s difficult to describe precisely but definitely a shared phenomenon.

> I’ve noticed mostly with female influencers, where they talk in a lower, quieter voice, that feels both like they are educating as well as perhaps infantilizing the listener.

It’s called “patronizing.” These people think they are more interesting and intelligent than they actually are and take on this air of pretentious lecturing.

It's awful. I was impressed by the video and the technology, but the presentation style is irritating.

I felt especially sorry for the people working at the Rwanda site just trying to do their jobs efficiently, while he mucks about being fake-excited about everything. There's almost an air of "smile and nod and hope he goes away soon" about it

I think you're reading into it. Mark Rober is one of the good guys. lol

Yeah, he's a former NASA engineer making some pretty solid community contributions.

> I cut my finger making lunch? So I placed an order for some bandaids a couple minutes ago? And now they're four seconds away! That is a nearly silent drone system that can deliver a package from the sky? Right to my backyard in as little as two minutes? With dinner plate accuracy!

Where else do people talk like this? What motivates this kind of speech?

Viewer retention, remember when you were taught to make an interesting intro to an essay to grab the reader? This is just that in video form, to really succeed in getting to the front page/trending of Youtube you really have to grab randos who aren't necessarily coming to you for your content so it has to have an attention grabbing start.

> Where else do people talk like this?

On TV, but it got out of fashion recently.

There's a Monty Python sketch about an island full of foreign news reporters that's quite illustrating.

You can ask ChatGPT to make it 500 words intro. It will sound natural, just like, how you talk with your friends. People don't want to wait for someone talking something 5 minutes then realize that it's not the video they want to watch.

The idea is that you want to say everything about the video within 10/15 seconds to make viewer interested.

Just like how you want that the title of HN story must be under 80 character, not 800. Do you start conversation with someone by saying 80 words then go on for 30 minute?

My totally made up backstory for why this is is from bad editing in the early days of chopping up multiple takes where the edit does not happen on natural sentence endings so those intonations happen at unnatural places. it then became a thing and now is done in normal delivery as a style to be emulated.

Oh, around 2010 youtube (peak vlogger era) the cool thing to do in monologues was removing pauses between sentences, making a sort of galloping cadence.

Can’t say for sure where it comes from. But upspeak and it’s tangential culture does more psychic damage to me than advertising, “bad ux”, dubious business models, and most of the other common gripes on here

Mark Rober is one of the big-name youtubers that so many other youtubers try to emulate, so whatever his reasons are, the reason it sounds so "youtubey" is probably because it's how Mark Rober talks in his videos.

Its the male "comedic" friendly voice.

Essentially its a learned affectation to come off as approachable and unthreatening (see also Jimmy Fallon) to garner views. Read a "boring" technical article at Ars or watch this guy fumble around and be silly and give these practiced big smiles? A lot of people would rather watch a 20-30 minute video that's entertaining and lower information than read a 5 minute article thats denser.

Essentially this is blogspam in video form and it makes a lot of people very wealthy, so its not going away anytime soon.

As someone who loves the arts, but can't get into youtube personality culture, its just so crazy to me people watch these things. They're a bit infantlizing to me. "Oh you want to learn about these drones? Instead of proper sources here's some guy who will pretend to be your friend and do silly comedic things for you while explaining it to you on the 5th grade level." Umm ok.

The most positive thing I can say is that there are people out there who can't read well (or read English at all) or can't learn from reading well, so these videos can be seen as helping a vulnerable demographic in an accessibility-like way. It may also attract younger people who otherwise would never read an Ars or Hackaday or HN (or whomever) article because these outlets are just not super accessible to them (unknown site to them, written on a too low level, etc). And that these video personalities could be a stepping stone into better and deeper media.

Essentially media is a free capitalist market and people choose their media sources, via their own biases and limitations. If they want everything explained to them via a Jimmy Fallon impersonator, then it will happen. Eventually the lowest common denominator demands questionable gimmicks and the market is more than happy to oblige.

Personally, as someone who does enjoy youtube but also relates to the grating nature of over "blogspammy" content, I think the key is I'm rarely if ever only watching a youtube video. Audiobooks/podcast when I can focus, youtube videos when I can't/doin something else. Can tune in and out easily and mostly not miss most stuff as I'm scrolling elsewhere.

Great analysis though, "blogspam" in video form is a fantastic metaphor for the over produced algo gamey vids. (Perfect length to hit max ads, thumbnail, title, intro template, etc)

> Instead of proper sources here's some guy who will pretend to be your friend and do silly comedic things for you while explaining it to you on the 5th grade level.

Well, Mark Rober's intended, primary audience (don't let youtube hear this) is 5th graders so I don't know what you expected.

They aren't trying to sell kiwico kits to 26 year olds you know.

That's fair but Rober does the standard "Youtube voice" and persona popular in many demographics. I don't think its fair to say this is something unique to 5th grader audience YT's. This is practiced persona that leads to social media success in many venues.

Also HN isnt a 5th grader's venue, so its interesting how normalized it is posting children's media in adult spaces, probably because he doesn't come off as much more childish than most YT personalities.

that's not bad, upspeak is a great way to label the phonetic dancing being done. For that guy he always talks like that, something in the strong direction of salesman like. Sometimes you can go far back enough in the video history to sample their persona developing over time, eg ChrisFix videos on YouTube have undergone a more muted and normal speech pattern to the more ebullient stuff you find later.

I think the style arose out of a need to fill a 1-minute video targeted at an audience of low attention-span 13 year olds with 9 additional minutes of CONTENT! in order to meet the length requirement for monetization. If the filler CONTENT! is bombastic and sing-songey, it keeps your attention, however vapid it may be.

Also noteworthy is that Rober is a really good looking former engineer/technician. Most men I've known in the field do not have such as mediagenic appearance, but he is attractive enough that people accept him as a presenter.

>because it sounds like you're asking a question? all the time?).

I've noticed this among a lot of leftist/Liberal podcasting as well (like Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, lot of NPR presenters).

I don't understand it. it sounds unserious

The blood-delivery-via-catapulted-drone is pretty awesome. Video is definitely worth a watch!

Yeah, it starts with the US drones, and those are nice, but just vastly less cool than what is used in Rwanda, which the video quickly pivots to.

I mean, the part where it's pure electric is what strikes me as a significant for other applications: this is an adaptation in logistics that can be rolled out independent of people's personal transport preferences.

Every bit of volume pretty directly can knock some ICE usage off the road, and more importantly because batteries are integral to the process it's pretty amenable to be running purely on renewables.

That's a hell of "technology which can just plain make everything better" possibility.

I guess for me the difference is that one is only now being tested in the USA. And even if successful, it will take forever to come here in Germany, especially in any place but Berlin/Hamburg/Munich.

And the other one is in active use.

Completely agree; he should have led the video with the medical drones. When it was recommended by the algorithm, I watched a few seconds and then closed it—Okay, another drone delivery company... But then someone personally recommended I watch it so I gave it another chance and loved the Rwandan section!

They’ve been doing those deliveries in Rwanda for 6 years! Very impressive. This video has a bit more info and is less rushed: https://youtu.be/jEbRVNxL44c?si=vWGAmhDr2nyA-vDu

Came here to post this. Its one of the most amazing videos for me : combines medicine, engineering, entrepreneurship and flying!!

Look forward to more of their successes.

Also a nice peek at the Rwandese community.

For those that watched the video - what is being approved is the 'Sparrow' which is the catapult-launched drone they use in Africa.

All the 'hover over the house and winch down the package' aspects are still vaporware.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c

For others interested in how these Sparrow (“Platform 1”) drones operate:

- Cruises at 80-120m and 60mph

- Max payload of 1.8kg

- 50 mile max delivery distance (although it can fly 190 mile on a single charge)

- Payload dropped by parachute from 25-30m into a 5m diameter landing zone.

More details on Wikipedia[1] and the Zipline site[2]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_comp...

[2] https://www.flyzipline.com/technology

They parachute deliver blood, but they will use a different technique for consumers.

From their website:

> Lowering from the body of the Platform 2 Zip, this little droid uses onboard perception to leave packages exactly where they're supposed to go, whether that's a doorstep or patio table.

While that is true for Platform 2 drones, from reading this article [1] it seems the ruling currently only applies to Platform 1 drones (ie. the specs I was referencing). Although it does seem like the Platform 2 drones would be more of what you’d imagine for drones dropping consumer packages in the US. And that article goes on to state that this ruling seems like a jumping off point for securing further exemptions (ie for the Platform 2).

[1] https://dronedj.com/2023/09/19/zipline-earns-faa-bvlos-exemp...

The FAA release is very short, only 3 short paragraphs. The third sentence is:

Zipline is an FAA-certificated Part 135 operator and will use its Sparrow drone to release the payload via parachute.

With these specs, I wonder if some countries military wouldn't be willing to offer them more money than they could ever make with deliveries... (At least on a per-drone basis)

1.8kg isn't much of a payload, nor is a 5m diameter very accurate for military use.

Spend 5-10 minutes on twitter watching drone footage out of the Ukrainian war, both sides are getting a lot of work done with less accurate, smaller payloads.

The traditional M18A1 Claymore mine weighs about 1.6 kg total and has optimal effect to 50m in a 60 degree arc (potentially lethal to 250m I think - Ed: "moderately effective up to a range of 100m ... fragments can travel up to 250m").

1.8kg of high explosives and shrapnel. That's a total havoc in a 5m diameter.

And the safe zone does not start at 6m.

It's 2-5 hand grenades.

Most of the time if you've decided to go the 'air superiority' route, then you're in a traditional war. So I feel that the cost-value factors will still favor dropping larger ordinance from much larger drones.

https://www.engineering.com/story/can-swarms-of-cheap-drones...

The most important number isn't in your list: noise level

That's what really needs solving for mass drones to take off.

They actually solved that. Watch Mark Robers video at 13m50s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOWDNBu9DkU&t=830s

However this FAA approval is apparently for the Gen1 fixed wing plane (which is quieter than a drone anyway). Their Gen2 "drone" design is barely audible.

the same quiet propellers are on both drones

I'm pretty sure Uber is now profitable. Not surprising considering the absurd prices they now charge for delivery. (probably not absurd w.r.t actual cost, but very very far away from the prices that they were charging when they started Uber eats)

And what's the computer platform they use on board?

Standard brick weights about 2 kg (4 pounds). Plus the drone itself probably another 2 lbs. Imagine getting bonked by a malfunctioning 6 lbs. drone at 200 mph.

This device though doesn't have the density of a brick, and it is aerodynamic: failure modes wouldn't be an uncontrolled freefall, it would be a stable glide.

You could fail-safe this by adding parachute pyrotechnics which require an active command signal to not deploy: that way the worst case total electrical failure of a drone would immediately deploy chutes to slow it down.

This seems like a much more acceptable control then the failure mode of a car: which weighs 2 tons and contrary to popular belief only stays on roads by convention.

That's already more or less a solved problem with consumer drones: outside a catastrophic mechanical failure like a wing shattering or the motherboars spontaneously dying, the failure state is that the drone either returns to its starting location using GPS, or hovers and waits for manual control until its battery is almost out and then slowly descends while beeping loudly.

The current version of the drones used here and mentioned by the FAA is a fixed wing design though, it’s only the second version that has the ability to hover. A loss of power at low altitude is going to mean it crashes into something. Reading through the links in the article there’s a lot of mention of their Detect & Avoidance system so presumably it can somewhat safely steer through the airspace.

I assume given the 5m radius for drops they’re going to be operating in places that mostly have low density though. I’d also assume that they’d plan flight paths to be as safe as possible.

in the video, it says that they have backup components or everything, and if they fail a parachute activates

> That's already more or less a solved problem with consumer drones

The words of a man who's never experienced rapid, unexpected, uncontrollable "drone flyaway". And yes, I have a modern, very capable drone and I'm not a complete idiot. Sometimes they just go... crazy.

I’m wondering if eventually airspace will be carved out for commercial drone operations. And if in the future the FAA will attempt to stop enthusiast drone operations via costly regulations in the name of safety for commercial drone ops. As it’s very easy for someone with a DJI drone from to fly beyond LOS.

Also a Walmart in my area has blocked off part of its parking lot to launch 6 delivery drones. I’m going to miss the days of quiet skies.

It certainly looks like hobbyist drones/model aircrafts are going to be regulated out of existence almost everywhere (maybe still permitted at registered club sites, but nowhere else?). Especially now the world has seen videos of weaponised FPV drones in Ukraine.

But I don't see drone deliveries becoming a big thing outside of niche cases (e.g. medical supplies to remote locations with no easy road access). Payload capacity is very limited, wind/weather will ground them, and delivering to arbitrary homes/businesses (without dedicated landing/drop-off zones) isn't a solved problem. Then there's the safety/liability issues when they drones fail/crash. And the inevitability of Americans shooting guns at them.

Read up on the upcoming FAA Remote ID regulations. They were scheduled to go online last Saturday, but were postponed 6 months. They would effectively make it illegal to fly at any altitude without a transponder broadcasting the precise location of the aircraft.

The RC community has been pushing back on the regulations as it ads a lot of weight, expense, and complexity to drones and RC aircraft. There hasn't been any justification given by the FAA as to why these regulations are needed, adding to the confusion. Normally restrictions are put in place after an accident or some incident.

This reminds me of Uber, Lift, and food delivery companies... Years and decades of VC money poured in, and they still can't get profitable. How the fuck anyone can think using drones, with current technology, can be profitable in consumer-centric logistics?

Drone logistics has its unique value proposition, primarily for medical transfers and emergency deliveries in remote areas. But thinking that flying drones from city to city, or inside the city, will replace or offset road logistics to deliver someone a book in 50 minutes is just stupid.

Does anyone here think Zipline will justify its crazy multi-billion valuation?

Things like books are generally in the 'free delivery' part of the delivery market, where your parcel arrives in a day or two on the back of a truck, and one truck does hundreds of deliveries before returning to the depot to reload. IMHO drones are very unlikely to replace trucks in that portion of the market.

But there are also people paying ~$10 per delivery for someone to bring them fast food. Where the driver goes directly from the restaurant to the customer, only carrying a single delivery. They might not need to carry more than 2kg.

Of course that depends on it being safe, reliable, legal, having nontrivial range with its full payload, and not damaging the product.

The cost of food delivery is dirt cheap, though, in most places it’s under $5. The reason it’s so cheap is because it leverages existing infrastructure and there’s an unlimited supply of people willing to deliver for below minimum wage. I can place an order for food and have it arrive within 15 minutes because there’s hundreds of delivery drivers just sitting around waiting in any major city, and that system is very flexible, we can have thousands more drivers on the road in minutes if demand surges.

For drone delivery to compete with this on cost, it would need to have tens of thousands of drones available in any city. How much does a drone and the infrastructure to operate it cost?

Drones benefit from being better over longer distances in cities but otherwise, it’s hard to imagine how they can compete (on price) with a system that is already extremely efficient (at the expense of the people participating in it).

> The cost of food delivery is dirt cheap, though, in most places it’s under $5.

I'm 0.6 miles from Starbucks and right now, a coffee that costs $2.78 in store costs $12.22 if I get it delivered.

Of course rather than listing it as a $9.44 delivery fee they just add a few bucks to the price of each item, plus a few bucks small order fee, plus a few bucks service fee, plus a few bucks delivery fee. So I can see why customers might perceive it as costing less than $5.

> How the fuck anyone can think using drones, with current technology, can be profitable in consumer-centric logistics?

Thing is, many societies are heading for demographic collapse or are already neck-deep in it (Japan). Even if it may be unprofitable now, we (as a society) need to invest serious amounts of money into automating a lot of unskilled labor, because otherwise we will run into disaster.

You're thinking about automation, not drone deliveries.

Where those aspects intersect is that it seems easier to build an autonomous flying vehicle than an autonomous road-going vehicle. Of course, drones have their own downsides for deliveries, including cost because of small payload.

> Where those aspects intersect is that it seems easier to build an autonomous flying vehicle than an autonomous road-going vehicle.

Someone needs to carry the parcel from the road vehicle, in contrast to a drone that flies up to the customer's window, fire exit or whatever.

Japan's reproductive stats are not uniquely bad, they just don't accept the same level of immigration as other developed countries.

to be fair, automating all unskilled labor jobs is likely to be a different sort of disaster, specifically for people unable to perform skilled labor.

We've been automating away labor for 250 years now.

It's clearly the best thing that's ever happened in human history, so far.

It's about labour. Replacing the salary of a human physically delivering a package will cover any overhead two times over.

You don't seembto grasp the reality of delibery drivers salaries. Teamsters are the exception, and even they are competively cheap per parcel delivered, otherwise UPS would never have agreed.

2-3 grant for a month of delivering parcels. How many parcels. 500? 1000? Thats 2 to 6 dollars per parcel. Goodluck bringing your costs down to that level with drones.

I would definitely use the service if it was offered and pay extra to have things delivered. For example say my car breaks down, I am reading codes off the car and it says I need a part. Call parts store and they have it, have it sent over while I finally get a chance to eat some lunch or something. Also I wouldn't have to find a ride to go get said part.

Middle of cooking dinner and realize you are out of a couple ingredients and they can offer half hour delivery, sometimes it takes 45 minutes in the last city I lived in to get to Walmart. This service would be appealing.

This is going to appeal to those who are ultra busy and are willing to spend a little extra to get something delivered promptly without leaving their home.

Uber, Lyft and other delivery companies require a human to be making the delivery. That's the whole point about why this has potential to be more economically sound.

So you think drones that require recharge (battery replacement) every 40-60 minutes and carry 1.8 to 2kg of cargo will replace a human? I don't think so.

I believe in autonomous drone delivery, which will probably be a reality one day. But the prerequisite for that is enormous advancement in battery technology. Nothing else matters if you can't fly a day or two without recharging.

> every 40-60 minutes and carry 1.8 to 2kg of cargo will replace a human

Yes, and I've seen it work for the already existing road drones. You still need a human to be there swapping batteries but that one human can do the delivery work of probably 50 people based on how fast each swap was. When I toured they weren't at the scale where they were continuously replacing batteries so it was only about 10x at the time.

The economics that will make or break it is the lifetime cost of the drone, but it absolutely can replace humans.

Why does that matter once there are enough charging stations and you have enough drones? Once you have enough battery life to do any single delivery and return to a charger, that’s all you need, everything else is just a bonus.

Given what they have been doing in Rwanda with blood delivery, yeah, I do think they have something going here. The tech is 'mostly' proven to me. The question is one of scale and usage.

> The question is one of scale and usage

So in other words the hard part.

> with current technology

They’re literally building new technology

There is nothing new there from a technology aspect. What part of the drone didn't exist 20 years ago? Or 50? But I primarily meant on battery technology anyway. Until you have entirely new battery technology that will be compact, ultralight, safe, and long-lasting (at least a day or two of flight without recharge), drone deliveries will not be profitable.

It will serve the niche market, though. But that's not a multibillion-dollar market with a bunch of competitors.

Let's see:

- silent propeller

- advanced computer vision

- miniaturised compute power

- precise civilian positioning systems

- batteries with good-enough densities

Of those, batteries are indeed the biggest blocker but let's not pretend there hasn't been any progress in the past 20 years.

Why do they need to last a day or two without recharge? Just have charging hubs that swap out the batteries for fresh ones, and now it's an optimization problem

>This reminds me of Uber, Lift, and food delivery companies... Years and decades of VC money poured in, and they still can't get profitable.

I think it was Uber, I remember reading that one of them would be profitable if they shut down their R&D department and focused on just ride sharing.

I don't know about justifying their multi-billion dollar valuation but the killer application of this in my mind is for pharmacies. There are a lot of pharmacies offering same day delivery now for both prescription and over the counter drugs, and a lot of people that need drugs that can't otherwise go out and get them on their own. My in-laws get their drugs delivered this way sometimes and it's almost always a driver in their personal car that drops off the delivery. I'm guessing the drivers are only dropping off a few prescriptions per trip, so it's likely not very efficient.

The supply chain proposition in the video is very enchanting, at least for Africa, where it can cut down transport times from days to hours

  multi-billion valuation

in which market?

Uber and Instacart are both currently profitable.

One of my favorite companies since I heard about them - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c

I personally believe this is the way forward, like in a star wars movie full of a plethora of "dumb" robots who have a specific work task, and are almost self sufficient. Like you have a robot that fix delivery drones, a robot that assembles them, and etc.

Drones will be also much better at avoiding obstacles, and they will be much more efficient than cars.

I am not really sure why there isn't more competition in this market. I believe they can build an autonomous delivery hub, and factory.

I wish them all the best.

Irish company Manna have been doing this in two Irish suburbs for a number of years now. They're worth checking out - their CEO Bobby Healy often tweets interesting stuff around payloads, journeys per day, route maps etc. I've worked with them a little and think they're building something really interesting.

Thanks, haven't heard of them before, but they do look cool. Just adding the links here:

https://www.manna.aero/

https://twitter.com/realBobbyHealy

Very much not excited or looking forward to drone and aerial vehicle/taxi/Uber visual and noise pollution.

This isn't progress, this is selling out our well-being and environment so that a few people can get rich.

I also don't like how the rich get away with things - but is that the case here? Zipline's drones are probably better for the environment than ground vehicles because they are small, light, and electric. They're also supposed to operate at 55 dB for people on the ground - similar to how noisy a delivery van is.

Yea I definitely think it's the case here. The thing about the delivery van is that it doesn't go away, we just add additional noise with the delivery drone. Delivery vans can be made to be electric as well to bring the noise down further and so you actually just get loud drones and quiet delivery vans.

But the delivery drones are just one aspect. We're also going to get these flying taxis and those are going to suck too. Why invest or pay to maintain roads or highways or to build and improve sidewalks, bike lanes, busses, or rail lines when you can just take your air taxi directly to your landing spot and make sure to avoid contact with any humans along the way.

A good lens that you can use to examine this technology is whether the drones and air taxis are additive or subtractive. Good technology tends to be subtractive, i.e. an iPhone replaced a lot of unnecessary things (of course it had some downsides). Sidewalks and bike lanes are another good example of subtractive technology.

Additive technology would be something like a heated seat subscription, or these air taxis and drones. We're not really improving anything we're doing today, we're just adding to it. It's like feature creep.

It's not clear to me why you think they won't reduce delivery van usage. It's hard for me to imagine that they would not.

I'd also argue that more environmentally friendly, faster, potentially less expensive delivers are an improvement on what people are doing today.

Air taxis are very different from a regulatory perspective (greater safety requirements) and from an engineering perspective (much heavier payloads). I don't really see this authorization as evidence that they will be approved in the future.

Did you even watch the video? It specifically addresses the noise pollution question, and is one of their very significant engineering feats. Obviously, it is yet to be proven at scale, but if it works as the vision and developments so far indicate, it would be a net reduction in noise pollution compared to our current infrastructure which executes these deliveries.

It's not just noise pollution, it's visual pollution as well. Pretty soon they'll attach little advertisements to them and cameras and when they fly by your window as your enjoying your morning cup of coffee it'll ID you and slow down a little, track your eyes, make sure you see that Amazon or Costco sells coffee for $14, give you a score, send you an email, and send you a flyer in the mail. They'll know when your backyard is in need of watering, and maybe they'll even see that your garden isn't doing so well and send you ads for fertilizer or alert local gardening companies to stop by and talk about how whatever is really harming your tomatoes and they've got just the solution.

Being noisy and annoying is just the very tip of the development iceberg here.

Can a delivery driver do some of this stuff today and so why haven't they done it yet? Sure. And idk, it'll just take time. The UAV platform is going to be a lot better for this kind of nuisance.

This kind of seems like a sci-fi scenario, not something that is likely to happen.

If lawn-care companies wanted to do targeted advertising based on how your lawn is looking, they can already use satellite imagery for that. They don't need drone cameras.

These drones also aren't going to fly by your window. They fly above the height of houses, trees, etc. - and they are too small ads you could see from that height

Wing/plane drones are substantially quieter than quadcopter drones. I'm out flying RC with folks all the time and it's genuinely hard to hear an RC plane from more than 100 feet away, and these are handbuilt planes flying for fun.

Yea but I don't want to see or hear them at home. There's enough noise pollution as it is with people revving motorcycles and the like or whatever other peacocking people waste time doing.

There's quite a good video on "Drone Delivery Was Supposed to be the Future. What Went Wrong?". It's been a decade since Bezos launched drone deliveries but it hasn't taken off for a number or reasons including air traffic control around airports, people living in flats and the difficulties of getting a drone to find a safe spot. On the other hand Uber Eats type guys on ebikes have proved a practical solution. https://youtu.be/J-M98KLgaUU

> The FAA authorized Zipline International, Inc., to deliver commercial packages around Salt Lake City and Bentonville

Is there something about the geography or climate of these two places that made them the right choice to be the testbeds for this platform?

Walmart is based in Bentonville. e.g.: https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2020/09/14/walmart-and-zi...

I think it’s just the sites close to customers. Bentonville is likely for Walmart.

And SLC is for their other customer, Intermountain Healthcare

https://www.deseret.com/2022/10/4/23385813/drone-delivery-in...

Salt Lake is a super grid with a street naming convention that only a drone could love. Northwest South 1st East Street.

Not sure the rotors would be optimal at that altitude though.

Walmartville might also be problematic with all those shotguns. Bird dogs may not be optimal at retrieving quadcopters. Would make a good SNL skit.

The Zipline Sparrow isn't a quadcopter, but a fixed-wing aircraft: https://amablog.modelaircraft.org/amamuseum/2023/08/11/zipli...

But it can stop and hover in place right? In that regard, it's still a sitting duck for people who want to cause problems. Though granted, the likelihood that someone from a neighborhood who wants to do something like that using the service seems unlikely...

> Northwest South 1st East Street

Where are you getting this? I don’t believe there’s any such named street or naming convention like this in Salt Lake. Google Maps appears to agree, since it can’t find that street.

There are addresses that Google reports using naming conventions from other cities, which makes things a little confusing. But locals use Cartesian coordinates for most addresses, it couldn’t be simpler, e.g., 1259 east 900 north (fake address, real naming convention).

> 1259 east 900 north

If you're a robot. Imagine driving around at night before smartphone apps and trying to find a place.

It was easier to navigate at night in Salt Lake before smartphones than almost any other city. You still don’t need a smartphone today to find addresses by their coordinates, it’s dead easy. You can instantly tell which direction to drive and how far away it is by the address too. I do not understand why you think a simple grid with predictable coordinates is difficult. What naming system or city layout do you think is easier?

One of Salt Lake’s defining features is how much easier addresses are than other cities. “Though the nomenclature may initially confuse new arrivals and visitors, most consider the grid system an aid to navigation.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Lake_City#Layout

This is incredibly cool! I was wondering when it would come to the US, but figured it would get stuck in legal approval hell. So exciting that it's actually coming.

This is just one city.

I could imagine they won't be allowed to spread to any more cities due to actual or exaggerated noise complaints.

Every competitor has an incentive to delay them - and therefore there are lots of people who want to set up 'salt lake city quiet sky protest group'

It is two cities, SLC and Walmartville. It's like in literally the second line of the FAA notice.

Is it a NIMBY sentiment to not want these in cities?

I can't imagine the kind of clusterfuck these would cause in a sufficiently dense city. The sky blotted with these...

I personally feel it is NIMBY. They actually provide a useful service. They would like NOT to have clusterfucks because they are dangerous to their operations. The noise level is much improved in this design. I think an honest shot is worth it.

> They would like NOT to have clusterfucks

That's not based on actual experience.

And it isn't a useful service, IMO. It's another attempt to sell something that's currently shared (air-space, silence), while not offering benefits in a city. In remote areas, it could offer something, but I'm sure the big bucks are to be found in densely populated areas.

> It's another attempt to sell something that's currently shared (air-space, silence)

Silence isn't part of the tradeoff, since delivery trucks and vans are much louder. And I prefer giving up airspace to deliveries, since my kids aren't playing in the airspace.

Yeah... people pay for it... because it's useful. That's usually how money works. I am kind of irked by this pervasive cynicism on HN where whenever some guys want to build something, the crowd goes "boooo, you're stealing from us!! This won't work!!! There will be some cost and we're not willing to pay anything!! "

Be sure to also imagine all the car traffic it replaces gone.

Usually it doesn't replace car traffic, it just allows more traffic from other sources of traffic, adding lanes to roads supports this, humans will fill the vacuum with something else. laws of efficiency demand it.

Delivery that a drone could replace are maybe 1% of the traffic MAX.

Much like delivery vehicles clog the streets today in most major cities!

I don't think so. These would be a disaster for birdlife in any city. Not to mention privacy and the fact that many places have extensive no drone fly zones already for essentially these reasons.

Cats are a bigger current disaster for bird life.

Drones are not going to replace the cats.

Hard to say without seeing what it looks like in real life. In principle it seems like it could replace delivery vehicles on the road and those delivery robots on the sidewalk, which could be a net benefit. In practice I imagine we'll just get the worst of all three.

Trying to get your wheelchair across the street when there's an Amazon van with its blinkers on blocking the curb cut on one side and two delivery robots in a stalemate in the other curb cut, above you a delivery drone gets confused by GPS signals bouncing off the skyscrapers and crashes into a freshly cleaned window, falling to the street beside you. Two thirds of this story is already happening, we'll have to see what new excitements drones can add to the mix.

Just want to quickly point out how much of a lifesaver delivery services are for many disabled folks. As someone who is disabled I find it very strange how critical abled people are of these technologies, even going so far as to use our situations in arguments against it without actually getting our opinion on it.

I'd expect the economics to work better the sparser the region. In Manhattan you can just send out someone on a bike, in the endless suburbia called Los Angeles it starts making sense, but I imagine this really shines if you want a Starbucks in a town that doesn't have a Starbucks.

This only works in sparsely populated areas like the US though. I can't imagine this working in European countries (or cities like New York) where most people live in multi-story buildings in the city that are shared with other people. Where would the drone land?

> can't imagine this working in European countries (or cities like New York)…where would the drone land?

My fire escape. Drones are perfect for vertical environments.

> My fire escape

Most of these are small. It's already a challenge to navigate a Mini 3 Pro, or even a GoPro Karma (~1 kg) as it can jitter around quite a lot simply due to random wind.

Confined spaces are no bueno for drones

Pretty sure the need to keep fire escapes clear for emergencies will lead to the drone companies going bankrupt from fire marshal fines very quickly.

Most apartments don't have fire escapes.

> Most apartments don't have fire escapes

Show me the overlap between potential demand for drone delivery, on one hand, and people who have no porch, fire escape, balcony or window from which they can suspend a platform?

The drone doesn't land, but the roof is the obvious answer. Pretty sure other apartment complexes/drone delivery services have proposed this model. It actually seems more ideal than dealing with a suburban environment that has trees and utility poles.

I wonder if we’ll ever replace letterboxes with package chimneys to accommodate aerial delivery

Santa Claus was ahead of his time! The next Silicon Valley is the North Pole!

I never order takeout etc, because getting in to my building is so complex it's easier for me to go to the restaurant.

If a drone could gently drop items on my roof, that would be a real game changer for my life!

Can I help you build a food zip line system? :)

What about the noise pollution?

Interesting you should ask.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z58RORCUTao

“Silent” is a stretch, though it doesn’t seem too bad: https://youtube.com/shorts/W_WDw1KFHUg

They're quiet enough that if you're anywhere near a road you won't hear them over the noise of car tyres. In the video you linked the sound of the parachute deploying was significantly louder than the drone itself, that's close enough to silent for me.

Been following them for a while, this episode from No Priors podcast to be honest is one of the best episodes I've listened in a while (all podcasts in).

Really happy for them on being approved to fly in the US.

Here's the episode - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eIxL0NnMko

They say there's no such thing as a free lunch, but now it will just require good aim and a recoverable projectile!

You can sit outside McDonalds with a baseball bat today, but I don't think that's what most people have in mind when they talk about "free lunch."

I've always thought shopping would be more fun if it was less similar to gathering & more similar to hunting.

Scan the sky for size 10 sneakers. Pull back the drawstring and BAM! Now you have shoes and a story to tell.

Ronnie, I feel like you're just here for the zipline

We're like 3 steps away from Factorio-style logistic robots...

The factory must grow!

Except for the entire assembling random stuff...

So now we will be surveilled everywhere we go. If you think these drones won't be recording you and that that data won't be used against you then you haven't been payimg attention.

Have you heard of smartphones? Not that the fact that we willingly buy surveillance devices (crave them, even) justifies additional police-state BS with delivery drones, of course. Both are bad news couched in very awesome ideas about convenience and connectivity. My biggest worry is that if everyone turns their attention to the sky, the devices in our pockets will just get more invasive. A near literal "look at the birdie" distraction!

Worse is worse.

At minimum I would expect a real time feed of license plates, into databases like Vigilant Technologies for use by insurance, law enforcement, etc.

Can we please not fill the air with delivery drones... Between the noise and the inevitable surveillance that'll come with them can we not just deliver via e-bike or something...

Eating Prime Air's lunch. Zipline is to SpaceX what Prime Air is to Boeing, often literally because Prime Air has hired so many ex-Boeing guys in the Seattle area.

Related company that's doing similar work: Talyn! They're a great team, and really excited about the work they are doing.

https://www.talyn.com/

I don’t understand why we don’t have delivery tunnels

Because digging tunnels is an absurd amount of work?

We still do it for cables, water and sewage?

All of which use max 10cm diameter pipes at the source. You need to 10x that (100x area) to delivery stuff.

That is a very interesting idea: to build small tunnels / raise along the side walk/streets for small robots/drones. It even does not need to be a tunnel: a covered trench, 50cmx50cm , would do the trick.

NYC does have delivery tunnels! Or tunnel, probably. There’s a tunnel in manhattan under 9th avenue that connects the Morgan postal sorting facility to the Farley post office!

Similar things have existed like the Chicago Tunnel Company or the London Post Office Railway.

Yeah, they were actually kind of practical, at least for some products and geographies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#Historical_use

I remember seeing a big one of these built at the CCC Congress. It had some bugs but people were able to use it to send capsules all over the convention center. It was a cool steampunk alternate future kind of experience.

You mean like a city-wide pneumatic tube setup?

Seems kinda Jetsons to me.

I wonder how many drones falling out of the sky and dropping on cars/people will it take to rescind this?

Shadowrunners needed. Transport job. Paying top Nuyen. Rigger a must. Contact: Zipline

Where can I learn more? A first instinctual impression of this is that this is a terrible idea and may lead to many injuries and damage to property. I'm open though to having my mind changed as there seems to be a growing set of people doing this.

It wouldn't lead to many injuries. Things like this are mostly safe to roll out as long as they can be paused or rolled back if anything happens.

A few days ago, i saw this article in SF Chronicle; a joint opinion piece from MIT professor Carlo Ratti:

"Uber was supposed to help traffic. It didn’t. Robotaxis will be even worse"

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/robota...

The basic gist was, convenience of ride-sharing / seduced us into over using cars. It was supposed to have the opposite effect

"...ride-hailing and ride-sharing could make our streets cleaner and more efficient. ... With minimal delays to passengers, we could match riders and reduce the size of New York City taxi fleets by 40%. More people could get around in fewer cars for less money. We could reduce car ownership, and free up curbs and parking lots for new uses"

but ... they did not take into account changes in human behavior. People stopped walking, using bicycles, etc...

"On average, ride-hailing trips generated far more traffic and 69% more carbon dioxide than the trips they displaced."

I think this is what will happen with these drone delivery services. As it becomes easier to order a box of bandaids and have it delivered in 4 minutes, people will change their behavior, we will be ordering more frequently one-off things from Walmart several times a week, and the sky will be filled with drones...

and it will be hell.

This isn’t a new idea. In 1865 the economist William Stanley Jevons pointed out that increasing the efficiency of machines that burned coal would lead to more coal being burned, not less.

Making something more efficient makes it cheaper, unlocking new use cases and consumption by people who couldn’t afford it earlier. That’s what we call Jevons’ Paradox.

Jevons was worried that the UK would run out of coal entirely. This question, asked in 1865, is similar to the 20th century worry of Peak Oil.

> Are we wise in allowing the commerce of this country to rise beyond the point at which we can long maintain it?

Jevons, William Stanley. The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines. Macmillan and Co., 1865.

This is also the case in software, improvements in hardware performance simply cause software to consume more resources, and not meaningfully increase the overall productive capability of a system.

Even that wasn’t the first time introducing efficiency had the opposite intended effect: the cotton gin was invented to reduce the reliance on slavery, it of course famously had the opposite effect, increasing demand for slavery as cotton became even more profitable.

> People stopped walking, using bicycles, etc...

Most big US cities are designed to be incredibly hostile to anything but cars. The only reason that people weren't already taking taxis all the time is that the legacy taxi system is also incredibly unfriendly to users.

> the sky will be filled with drones...

> and it will be hell.

Imagine that the drones would need to follow quite stringent routes for safety and noise avoidance. Also imagine that (currently) a <50-pound drone flying at 300 feet overhead has a lower sound volume than a passing delivery truck. Actually, don't imagine; it's quite true.

Why do you think it will be hell?

> Imagine that the drones would need to follow quite stringent routes for safety and noise avoidance

Does that matter if I can IPO the "future of delivery" for billions? Corporations consistently show us they are willing to eat fines as "the cost of doing business", especially if its a means to eating all competition.

I like the idea of quiet, localised drone delivery over trucks, but I also lament a future that has me looking into the sky to see no birds, only Ama-line™ drones dragging TikTok banners behind them.

The future probably has no birds anyway - nor can I halt the drone delivery progress, so I guess it's not worth thinking about.

My take is that autonomous cars will help parking and perhaps reduce the need for taxis, though that won't help traffic, indeed.

For instance, if my car can drive itself then I no longer need to park it near where I'm going and I no longer need a taxi to drive me to airport/station.

Regarding drone deliveries, the locations where it can be done safely is limited and there may be further legal restrictions if they cause a nuisance. We also need to see the cost, I doubt it will be worthwhile to order one-off small things often.

Emissions are getting irrelevant as EVs take over and electricity is generated by renewables.

> People stopped walking, using bicycles, etc...

Of course they did - it's inconvenient.

> On average, ride-hailing trips generated far more traffic and 69% more carbon dioxide than the trips they displaced.

Some points from the study that came up with that figure:

(Bottom line up front: electrified ride-sharing can lower emissions by 70% compared to driving a combustion car and is a good solution)

> A pooled ride-hailing trip shared between two passengers is similar in emissions to a private vehicle trip, and about 33 percent lower polluting than a non-pooled ride-hailing trip. Electrifying ride-hailing vehicles would dramatically improve the climate emissions of ride-hailing trips. An electric ride-hailing trip would cut emissions by about 50 percent compared to a private vehicle trip; a pooled, electric ride-hailing trip would lower emissions by nearly 70 percent compared to a private vehicle trip (or about 79 percent compared with a non-pooled ride-hailing trip).

> On average, bus and rail travel have lower carbon emissions than car travel in either a private vehicle or in a pooled or non-pooled ride-hailing vehicle. However, using ride-hailing to connect to transit can be a good low-carbon choice. For example, a pooled ride-hailing trip connecting to the train, where the ride-hailing trip is a quarter of the total trip length, can be more than 50 percent less polluting than a private vehicle trip.

Why would this be hell? We aren't in the sky, are we? It's mostly empty there.

We are on the ground. Fewer cars will be needed to deliver things.

I think this is a massive improvement and will finally use an underutilized resource we have.

> Why would this be hell? We aren't in the sky, are we? It's mostly empty there.

This attitude is why the planet is polluted and ecosystems are regularly destroyed. I wonder, is something else in the sky? Does the sky have a purpose beyond being a place where humans happen to not be?

Yes, with noisy drones flying over houses, each with a single package.

And due to tech issues, drones falling out of the sky, smashing into houses, and dropping objects from height.. a small mass at high speed, hitting the head, can kill, blind, maim.

It's one thing to have planes, with maintenance schedules, flying. And those same planes are expensive, thus there is great incentive to not destroy them by accident. Not to mention, the build and quality control is generally high.

Now imagine endless "cheap is best" drones from China. A lost drone? Meh.

This is a disaster.

I'm curious, did you read the actual press release or the approval letters?

From the press release:

> The FAA authorized Zipline International, Inc., to deliver commercial packages around Salt Lake City and Bentonville, Arkansas, using drones that fly beyond the operator’s visual line of sight.

emphasis mine and

From the approval letters:

> Flight operations must minimize ground risk and not overfly the following, unless otherwise approved by the Administrator: Power plants, Open-air assemblies of people, Schools during times of operation (e.g., elementary, middle, high, preschool and daycare facilities), Moving vehicles, except transitory flight operations, Roadways or highways, except transitory flight operations, and Any other area deemed high risk by the operator during the flight route design process.

> For all current operations areas, and prior to conducting operations in a new area, the operator must complete a ground risk assessment and submit it to the FAA for acceptance.

> The operator must maintain a conflict management capability to ensure that the PIC is able to keep the UA clear of any manned aircraft and other UA.

> The operator may only conduct operations at a UA-to-PIC ratio of 1:1 unless otherwise authorized by the FAA.

> Flights under special visual flight rules (SVFR) or instrument flight rules (IFR) are not authorized.

There's lots and lots of stipulations here. So what's your concrete complaint?

Their complaint is that they feel the sky will be filled with drones. And those stipulations do not address their concern in my view.

> but ... they did not take into account changes in human behavior. People stopped walking, using bicycles, etc...

That's known as "induced demand", and it's been known to exist in traffic since almost a century [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

Read “The Machine Stops” if you haven’t, it’s awesome.

Wait till people are accused of “crime” and are cut off from the airship delivery service.

https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...

But ride-sharing was never really a thing, was it? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone use it.

Before the pandemic, Uber Pool and Lyft Line were quite popular as a cheaper point-to-point transportation option in my city.

> A few days ago, i saw this article in SF Chronicle; a joint opinion piece from MIT professor Carlo Ratti: "Uber was supposed to help traffic. It didn’t. Robotaxis will be even worse"
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/robota...
The basic gist was, convenience of ride-sharing / seduced us into over using cars. It was supposed to have the opposite effect
"...ride-hailing and ride-sharing could make our streets cleaner and more efficient. ... With minimal delays to passengers, we could match riders and reduce the size of New York City taxi fleets by 40%. More people could get around in fewer cars for less money. We could reduce car ownership, and free up curbs and parking lots for new uses"
but ... they did not take into account changes in human behavior. People stopped walking, using bicycles, etc...
"On average, ride-hailing trips generated far more traffic and 69% more carbon dioxide than the trips they displaced."
I think this is what will happen with these drone delivery services. As it becomes easier to order a box of bandaids and have it delivered in 4 minutes, people will change their behavior, we will be ordering more frequently one-off things from Walmart several times a week, and the sky will be filled with drones...

and it will be hell.

People have a right to convenience and a better quality of life. Urban planners have a similarly flawed argument — tearing down highways will reduce traffic because everyone will take public transport. It merely forces the lower class and poor to suffer through public transit. The upper middle class, and similarly the tenured academics and policy wonks who came up with this sort of nonsensical arguments, never have to suffer the consequences of their own policies. It is a great thing in America that everyone can easily buy a car and enjoy the freedom. If cities want better traffic, then spend more money renovating or widening roads, not forcing poor people into crowded and uncomfortable public transport.

> If cities want better traffic, then spend more money renovating or widening roads

Widening roads just induces more driving.

https://twitter.com/alanthefisher/status/1491148250543386625

this is a better argument for improving public transport than it is for widening roads.

> People have a right to convenience and a better quality of life.

That's a pretty bold statement. Where is this right stated, and who guarantees it? Who do I go to if I feel my convenience and QoL isn't high enough?

Is this an absolute right that is realized at all costs? Even if my convenience affects the health and safety of others?

Reminder that Google is utterly a joke. Effectively infinite cash. Among the first-movers in the space. Literally nothing in full-scale production to show for it. And today, beat by Zipline. Yet almost every CS major at Stanford still stays up all night doing leetcode or whatever stupid thing they're doing to try to get a place there.

Let's not pretend our industry doesn't immediately up the prestige and desirability of anyone who has worked at Google.

I can already think of a friend off the top of my head who worked there. They will tell me their engineering work at Google is not even that impressive compared to her other technical accomplishments. Our industry doesn't seem to care and she gets immediate extra-prestige just from having "(ex-)Google" on her resume independent of her actual technical accomplishments at Google.

Those Stanford grads aren't dumb. They are reacting to the incentives of our entire industry and making a wise decision that favours their professional growth through accruing status and wealth - both resources which can catapult you to finally having what you need to go do "the thing" you actually want to do. Hence all the ex-Google startup founders.

> Yet almost every CS major at Stanford still stays up all night doing leetcode or whatever stupid thing they're doing to try to get a place there.

It's about the money.

Work at a startup, and get paid meager table scraps to "follow your dreams" and "work on something meaningful." Watch all your friends become millionaires while you work 14 hours a day to afford name-brand ramen noodles.

Or, work in Big Tech, get paid an actual decent salary, clock out in 60 hours or less every week while getting every perk imaginable, and retire into the upper-middle class before 50 (or 40, or sometimes 30).

>> get paid an actual decent salary, clock out in 60 hours or less every week while getting every perk imaginable,

....is that....meant to be good? As someone who works in "big tech" and works 37.5h a week I have no idea what kind of perk/money they would need to offer me to work 60 hours a week. I'm not sure that even exists - I like having a life outside of work.

Of course it's about the money. But wait, if these folks were so brilliant, couldn't they just do their own thing instead of throwing their weight behind an incumbent, bloated, legacy giant? Let alone their talent going to /dev/null?

> clock out in 60 hours or less every week

You misspelled 6.

Both of these seem .. illegal where I am from. 40 hours a week is the maximum an employee can ask of you in EU. So does Google in EU then explicitly ask in the contracts that you agree to work more hours or how does that work? And also, why the heck would anyone want to work more than 40 hours a week?

> Reminder that Google is utterly a joke

IMHO, misplaced blame. Rather let us think as _Amazon_ is utterly a joke, because they sprayed infinite(in terms of plebs like me) cash into drone delivery and still didn't make much progress in the space. Google is not even in logistics business and drone doesn't make any sense for them.

> Yet almost every CS major at Stanford still stays up all night doing leetcode or whatever stupid thing they're doing to try to get a place there.

In long-term, nothing trumps comfortable money and the prestige that comes with the name "GOOGLE" on a CV and opening more useful doors later on, compared to Zipline, which could've been any one of the other thousands of drone startups that came and went silently and didn't turn up much. We don't live in an ideal world, something all of us should remember.

Amazon didn't go anywhere with drone delivery because for most last mole delivery peoblems drones don't make sense. Especially not at the scale of Amazon. Sure, drones are great for really fast point-to-point deliveries, especially in remote areas. And that is not a problem Amazon, or any other company like UPS or DHL, has to solve.

Another business Amazon retired, but a ton of start-ups still think is a good idea, is groccery deliveries.

People are still acting like they’re putting openAI out of business when they release their closed beta ai model because its google.

Not out of business, but if the 5x rumored compute is true than they’d need to do something phenomenally bad to end up with a model worse than gpt-4.

They did that same move with bard, proving to put out fluff rumors and underdelivering by an order of magnitude from the public expectations while their competition silently overdelivers with a functioning product to all.

Why would a Stanford grad care about earning a meager salary at Zipline?

That's the problem GP is outlining. CS grads are breaking their backs to get a job at Google, then Google goes and wastes all that talent 'cause they can't get their house in order.

Zipline doesn’t pay like google but is decent, they post salaries for their roles. A Stanford classmate of mine works there according to LinkedIn.

Zipline pays very well

This doesn't surprise me, because unlike Google, they actually have an innovative contribution in production; and given all the evidence, it ain't gonna' be cancelled any time soon.

Plenty of Stanford Grads at Zipline! :)

I think people should pay a lot more attention to your comment. It’s a monumental statement and one which we, as technologists, should really be paying a great deal more attention to.

Changing the world involved actually thinking for yourself. And that is exceptionally rare.

Edit: Downvoted immediately. What social commentary. Now I know what I’m saying is true: people hate it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com