As if courier deliveries in Australia are not unreliable enough - they don't send out parcels and expect you to pick up from the depot - there is an attempt to deliver with no driver! Yes, the era of drone delivery is upon us it seems.
Next year Zookal will deliver text books from the University of Sydney directly to your mobile phone location. This is ludicrous. Can you imagine the congestion over cities with drones flying everywhere with no control. Why do we need air traffic controllers? They are essential to maintain safety of course.
Students are saying it will be good to receive university library books by drone. However, some scholarly books have more than 1,000 pages and are extremely heavy. Drones will have to be enormous to carry these. Crashes will be frequent with damage to buildings and those spinning blades will cause personal injury. Note, they will head to a phone and cannot see people.
Zookal assumes their concept will be accepted by Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA). They may insist on a control system. This will cancel out any potential profit. I cannot believe that CASA can possible agree to flooding the lower sky with drones darting about all over the place.
At the moment only emergency services use drones, so there are very few drones flying in the same geographic zones. Let us hope common sense prevails. Domino's Pizza recently delivered a Pizza by drone. This was a test and it ended at that point. Collision avoidance systems in drone is unreliable at the moment. When faced with a large flat wall like on a skyscraper they usually crash into it.
Conservation by Ty Buchanan
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