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 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 is still a major concern – Singh says that, for a commercial aircraft to be allowed to fly, it has to prove a rate of one serious failure every one million hours. Drones, he said, are a long way from that. “The Reaper drone has one failure in 10,000 hours,” Singh said. But they don’t consider an oil leak a catastrophic failure – something has to fall out of the sky.
What happens as you increase the distance a drone travels to deliver a package?
The drone becomes more dangerous to people It’s harder for the drone to spot dangers It would be acceptable only if the drone has less than one failure every one million hours The drone needs to fly faster