Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

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>The FAA situation. Drones are going to have _very_ restricted airspace especially in populated metro areas, if the FAA grants them these privileges at all. If you look at Los Angeles/SF/NYC/DC/Boston, you see airspace that is so overcrowded that I just don't see how drones are going to be zipping around here.

How do you figure? Do you realize how big the sky is? For every square foot of land there are tons of layers of airspace above it, and it's almost completely unused except for a few tall buildings and a relatively small number of flying vehicles (compared to what we manage to fit on the ground.)

Drones are fairly maneuverable and could be made with decent collision avoidance and sensors.

In addition to sensor-based collision avoidance you would probably want some means of communication between the drones so they can choose non-colliding flight paths in advance.

In the altitude these drones will be flying most of the regular traffic probably is composed of helicopters. For those Amazon could easily provide some means of requesting a temporary drone no-flight zone.

Ummm.... I couldn't see that video (restrictions on work internet) but AFAIK such small drones can fly up to a certain altitude. Sure you have an insanely large amount of sky up their but can these machines access that?

Imagine how many of these could fit on a single flat road. Then imagine stacking dozens of roads on top of that. Then imagine the roads are several times wider because there isn't any property or buildings in the way up there (with the exception of a few tall buildings in big cities.)

It will be a long, long, long time before we run out of airspace. It isn't the limiting resource at all.

I never doubted that we dont have enough of airspace, my question was can these lightweight machines make proper use of all that open space? how high can they fly? Because i am assuming these are relatively low-altitude aircrafts.

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