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 determines if a passenger plane is allowed to operate?
The number of serious failures every one million hours The number of minor failures every one million hours The number of serious failures every 10,000 hours The number of times it has been inspected within one week prior to take off