Has anyone done an analysis of the crash rate for large drones and likely casualty rate on the ground?
Has anyone done an analysis of the crash rate for large drones and likely casualty rate on the ground?
The DJI Phantom for example only has 4 rotors and a single battery, so any one failure of a component in the power train or controller will likely bring down the entire device.
The type of drone Amazon is likely to deploy widely in this scenario would of course be much larger, but would also have many more rotors, think of a copter with 8 arms and 2 motors per arm, with the power trains wired up as 4 independent systems each with 4 opposing rotors and it's own battery capable of keeping the device flying independently. Flight controllers can also be built hilariously cheap, so having 3 or 5 in a voting configuration is equally simple. Now you have a machine that can stay airborne and under control with over half of the rotors disabled.
When drones are making millions of flights a year, even a one in a million malfunction is likely to occur many times a year.
It's a shame we have become so risk adverse as there are plenty of things way more likely to kill you then drones.
Me: "No."
Police: "Did it cause more than £2000 worth of damage?"
Me: "I don't think so."
Police: "Call your insurer. This is not a police matter. Bye."
Insurers will presumably say "that's not covered" up until the point where they have an extra charge for drone insurance when they can say "you don't pay for that cover".
Where I live, if a drone crashed in flames, it would start a fire that would replay the Oakland Hills fire [1] with people getting killed. If a car were to crash on Sand Hill Road, not so much.
- Cars travel defined roadways having mandated brush clearance zones that diminish the likelihood of a vehicle crash/fire propagating into uncleared country. A fiery crash is very likely to be noticed and reported immediately, with no uncertainty about its location. Fire responders will be quickly dispatched to the correct location. The road on which the crash occurred will very likely give responders good access for their suppression work. If evacuation is needed, it's easier to direct evacuees to routes that will be most effective in getting them out of danger.
- A drone isn't constrained to defined roads. Compared to the car crash scenario, when a drone crashes away from roads and ignites vegetation, more time will pass before the fire is noticed - reported - located - and fire suppression resources put on site. Away from roads, this means airborne fire suppression and that adds at least 30 minutes to the response loop, even when (as now) there are airborne assets on alert. So an off-road ignition is almost guaranteed to have a longer incident response time than a car crash. Same is true of other off-road fire events like careless hiker cigarette toss, camping fires, etc. Directing evacuees which way to go becomes more difficult.
- Favorable firestorm circumstances: even small fires can combine with topography to generate fast up-slope winds that, while local, are very effective in broadcasting burning material that ignites locations remote from the original burn.
Summarizing, if a drone crash starts an initially unobserved fire in an uncertain location that's tough to access, there's a larger chance that it will become a danger to the local rural population than one started by a car crash.
I'd like to think that the cost of a passenger aircraft isn't the only reason why they come under more safety and regulatory scrutiny than a motor car. I'd hope that it's because they have an additional severe failure mode that cars don't called falling out of the sky.
I realise that I might be going on about this and I'm a layman, but it seems a bit overlooked that any object that is airborne and needs to be made safe surely starts at a large handicap compared to objects on the ground.
I'm not sure that we should assume that.
Anything that is 100-400 feet off the ground is inherently more dangerous than an equivalent object resting on the ground, simply because of what happens when it fails and gravity takes over.
We can compare automated flying drones to manually-operated cars. We could also compare automated flying drones to automated cars.
The drones scenario might end up safer than now. But I would not assume it.
I have no idea if it will offset or not, but I could see—even with a few thousand drones crashing every year—that a net benefit could still be realized because people are not driving to the store for some of their shopping.
But if drones are replacing car trips to the store, then there's a good opportunity there to offset automobile fatalities
In Houston there are only a couple of logistic centers for UPS and FedEx and whatnot. You wouldn't have a drone fly 40 (or maybe 100) miles round-trip to deliver a package all the way across town.
But if every regular delivery truck has 2x or 3x drones on top they can make small package deliveries without the driver stopping on his route as he/she delivers the bigger packages. The ones too heavy for a drone to lift.
The drones could make deliveries during the driver's lunch break which is a nice bonus. An hour with the truck parked in the same spot.
You could also have drone-specific semis that go on a very slow rotation around the city, moving a few miles quickly and then stopping so the drones can make deliveries from a "home base".
Drones are a good last mile solution but will never replace the back haul network. Wheel on pavement has incredible efficiency versus rotor through air.
How this will exist in the future in practice is pure speculation at this time. There are many different factors (autonomous vehicles, smarter routing techniques, routing changes as the burden is shifted to non-truck delivery systems, and increased demand for small package delivery as more shopping is done online, for example) that could dramatically reshape the delivery landscape.
Furthermore, heavy packages delivered to consumers in the US, like those containing appliances and furniture, are already routinely delivered by in-house or smaller delivery services rather than UPS, FedEx, or US Mail.
It would be interesting to see data on what % of amazon purchases are above the payload of a drone - i imagine they crunched the numbers themselves and determined it was low enough to justify continuing to push this issue (even after the FAA tried to ban[1] drone deliveries altogether)
Theyll look at $/package and time/package for drones and delivery drivers.
I imagine once you account for driver salary and benefits, cost of vehicles, cost of fuel and maintenance, cost of insurance for drivers and vehicles, cost of management structure to maintain drivers, schedules, routes, etc - the $/package for drones likely make up for any disadvantage they currently have in time/package
Also, drones can deliver packages 24/7/365, no reason you cant wake up to a package delivered overnight (maybe even your morning kindle (tm) e-ink newspaper)
[1]http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/24/faa-bans-the-use-of-drones-...
The fallacy in that thinking is left as an exercise for the reader.
Also, we have no idea what the drone-aircraft collision risk is. That seems like something that could be easily solved by strict control over who flies where in the sky. I'd guess that more people will die from these things falling on their head.
http://www.houselogic.com/home-advice/home-insurance/homeown...
"... either a major claim or too many claims in a given period, no matter how legitimate, could lead to losing your house’s coverage altogether..."
Sure, if it's a known drone from a large company, I'm sure they will have insurance, but what do you do when you have a $5000 hole in your roof and Amazon claims that the "Amazon" drone that you found is not theirs - someone slapped an Amazon label on their own drone to get away from the insurance requirements.
(a) Your house will get hit by a drone
(b) The collision will cause damage to the building
(c) The drone will have no ownership identifiers on it.
(Hint: Not Amazon, which is what we're discussing here)
You don't currently purchase "uninsured baseball thrower" insurance, do you? Those things cost tens of millions of dollars of damage in broken windows every year, but we've figured it out.But as drones become more ubiquitous and the big ones become cheaper and more useful, then the chance of damage increases.
Amazon isn't just talking about legitimizing their drones, but legitimizing drones in general with an "anything goes" airspace below 200 ft.
I wouldn't make a homeowners insurance claim for a baseball through the window since claims mean higher rates and multiple claims can lead to blacklisting among multiple companies. But a 20 or 30 lb drone dropping 500 ft to my roof may cause thousands of dollars of damage, and unless I can identify the drone's owner (or even if I do and he has no money), then either I or my insurance company is on the hook for repairs.
If heavy drones are crashing down often enough to cause problems (let's say more than a couple dozen times a year in the US), then rules will need to be put in place to curb that, sure.
I think you and I are arguing from different scopes here. My whole premise has been regarding Amazon-owned (or other commercially-owned) drones operating in our skies. You're--rightly--concerned about that guy down the street picking up a 30 lb. machine for fun, and not being responsible with it once it causes damage or injury. I think we can agree in that regulations on the craft and on the operator would apply before it's allowed to fly. Maybe the operator should be bonded and insured, and should have passed some sort of certification. The aircraft itself should meet some minimum standards of safety and redundancy. OR, if the aircraft meets some higher standard of safety and redundancy, then any civilian can operate it because it self-enforces flight safety rules.
Those same rules should also apply to any commercially-operated drones of course, but I've been assuming that, e.g. Amazon, would do this out of self-interest. They don't want to deploy a fleet of drones only to have a massive PR nightmare when things go south.
And after all these rules are in place, in the instances where someone does violate the law and flies illegally, existing insurance and law enforcement schemes would be able to handle it.
All I'm afraid of is cutting off innovation before it can occur, due to an over-abundance of caution. That's all.
I'm waiting for the ability to transmit "bird alerts" to chase away the drones I don't like.