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Comment by carlosjobim | Hacker News Reader

> They told me the payload on the drones would never make them serious competition.

Why can't drones be as big as a crop duster airplane and run on gas instead of batteries?

They could except for regulations. It is the same as driverless cars only much more disastrous potentially. You wouldn't want them crashing into other planes or flying into buildings.

I saw a drone demonstrated by a startup in 2005-2006 that could leave the airport in the morning and do aerial infrared photography all day and return at dusk. The FAA would never give them permission to fly and the company failed. Saw another company around 2015 show me the exact same thing except they had a chip that let them avoid aircraft and geofenced them from entering space around all airports. The FAA let them do a preliminary test which they passed but never let them have permanent permission so they ran out of capital and failed.

I fly ultralights / gliders. We don't have a way to deal with these yet and a system like that could be lethal to us. There is a reason they didn't get permission.

Thanks for the explanation! Then I don't see much future for drone dusting. They need to be big to bring a lot of payload.

Gasoline motors are much less reliable than electric motors and require a lot more maintenance.

Drones are small and cheap, so for the same amount of money you can have a lot of drones. So you should not compare load capacity for a single drone to an airplane, but instead compare load per dollar.

Being big is not always an advantage.

Multirotor drones have the advantage compared to planes that they drop straight down when failing, so less risk of continuing a long distance and crash in a town. Crashed drones also makes less of a mess when they do crash. FAA should adjust policy (for farming drones) due to this different risk profile.

Thanks for a thoughtful response!

There's absolutely no reason to run on gas whatsoever. A huge octocopter and hot-swappable batteries would have plenty of endurance, range limited only by the number of battery packs, cheaper to run, and far cleaner.

Then why don't normal crop dusting airplanes run on batteries?

Because normal crop dusting airplanes: are big and heavy, forcing big batteries. Hotswapping 10kg battery pack is much more feasible than hotswapping 100kg one. You can work whole day using 3 batteries regardless of size, but having to swap 10kg battery every 5 minute is more feasible than swapping 100kg battery every 30 minutes. Those planes cant land right at fields edge, so big chunk of energy in its battery would be needed to fly to and from nearest airstrip.

These things have to be trailered with a pickup truck and trailer, so there's only positive value in making it takeoff, land, and refill on the trailer and making it quick to swap batteries and refill the tank.

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