Do We Really Want Amazon's Drones to Swarm Our Skies?

Amazon has an idea for how to manage the future of autonomous delivery drones.
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Amazon

Lest you think Amazon's much-hyped plan to deliver packages by drone is a flight of fancy, the company has just shared its vision for the future of autonomous drones.

In the company's vision, presented at NASA's Unmanned Aerial Systems Traffic Management (UTM) Convention last week, delivery drones will zip around the sky a few hundred feet over our heads. They'll be smart enough to see and avoid other drones, and stick to predetermined layers of airspace to keep everything running smoothly.

In a few decades, the skies will hum with robots that bring us prescriptions, batteries, potato chips and everything else we're too lazy to pick up ourselves. But are we trading in quality of life for convenience?

Quality of Life

Delivery by drone promises several benefits. Less reliance on polluting, traffic-inducing trucks to make deliveries. No repeat trips to the store because we forget things. The classic charm of the neighborhood milkman can be replaced with the cat-terrifying thrill of a milkdrone.

But the increasing popularity of drones is already the source of lots of complaints and worries. They're noisy and generate privacy concerns. They interfere with other low-altitude airspace users, like cropdusting farmers and Boy Scouts shooting off model rockets. They cause trouble flying around wildfires and airports. What happens when they go from being common to everywhere? Does Amazon's vision for the future account for how it affects people on the ground?

Amazon says it isn't planning to build Jetsons-style highways in the sky, with drone after drone whizzing along carrying packages, but the drones could still make an awful racket if you lived near a warehouse facility or your neighbor buys a lot of stuff.

Still, drones wouldn't be the first promising technology to get the NIMBY-treatment. Yeah, wind turbines are great for generating clean power---until you want to put more than 150 of them off the coast of Cape Cod, and residents go bananas.

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The Rules

Amazon is thinking of airspace like a cake. Different layers include different permissions for vehicle types and technologies, keeping manned helicopters and planes away from unmanned drones---autonomous or otherwise.

Under the company's proposal, low-speed, "localized traffic" (upgraded versions of remote-controlled drones like the DJI Phantom) would be kept under 200 feet and within the operator's line-of-sight in rural areas, with more limited operations in suburban areas. The drones would be equipped with vehicle-to-vehicle communications tech so they don't crash into each other, as well as GPS and Wi-Fi connectivity to learn about no-fly zones and other alerts. Much of this technology already exists on high-end civilian drones.

High-speed automated drones---the ones Amazon plans on using---would fly between 200 and 400 feet, with fancy autopilot technology to automatically avoid other aircraft and no-fly zones. Manned craft---helicopters, general aviation planes and the like---would be required to stay above 500 feet, keeping a 100-foot buffer between the drones and the vehicles with people on 'em.

Raise the Ceiling

It's too soon to know how, exactly, our lives would be affected by this plan, but there is one problem with the proposal that should be fixed right off: It doesn't allow drones to fly high enough.

"What Amazon has put together makes sense from a layered airspace perspective," says Ella Atkins, associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan. But "there's no place" for the land owner. As you can see in the drawing above, Amazon sees the FAA and federal government taking control of all airspace, starting just a few dozen feet up.

That's where children have, for years, shot off model rockets or launched "dumb," handheld drones that can cost as little as $30. It's the airspace where a farmer might want to fly his crop-duster. It's the place where you never really had to worry about colliding or interfering with other aircraft. And it's typically the property of the landowner, as decided by the US Supreme Court in 1946. But under Amazon's plan, that might not be the case anymore.

To protect everyone's rights, Atkins suggests adjusting things slightly. "Amazon's picture is beautiful, but move it up two to three hundred feet," she says. Then, landowners would have room to shoot off model rockets or fly their inexpensive drones around---and Amazon (or UPS or FedEx or whoever) would still have plenty of room to zoom around delivering packages.

To compensate, Atkins suggests raising the minimum flight height for general aviation planes too, currently at 500 feet. "The number 500 wasn't picked on any scientific basis," she says. "It just made sense to keep general aviation planes more than 500 feet off the ground."

As it happens, raising that elevation would have the second benefit of easing most concerns about how it will feel to have a drone highway running overhead. After all, the the higher the drones fly, the quieter and less obtrusive they'll seem to us. Out of low altitude airspace, out of mind, right?

We're all for having six packs delivered by drone (as long as there's another robot to carry it to the sofa. We just have to make sure we're using our airspace---a public good, like radio spectrum---efficiently and for the good of all.