Huber said about Amazon: “I have heard them say that many packages are lightweight – a drone can carry a kilogram for 15 minutes. If you have a vehicle that can go into a neighborhood, it can deliver from that base. You need a 15-minute distance and typical off-the-shelf drones have about that distance.” It’s one way, he said, of making sure the surrounding population is relatively safe. “The larger the distance the drone travels, the more dangerous it becomes.” Of course, safety remains a major concern – Singh points out that, for a commercial aircraft to be considered skyworthy, it has to prove a rate of one serious failure every one million hours. Drones, he said, are “one or two orders of magnitude away” from that benchmark. “The Reaper drone has one failure in 10,000 hours,” Singh said. An oil leak, by the way, doesn’t count as catastrophic failure – something has to fall out of the sky.
What is one way to increase drone safety, according to Huber?
Have drones fly shorter distances Require drones to report their status every 15 minutes Prevent drones from delivering packages from vehicles Inspect drones more frequently