More Drone Deliveries Being Evaluated in America

Long-time Slashdot reader necro81 composes: For several years, Zipline has released self-governing, fixed-wing plane drones for medical supply deliveries in Rwanda. Now they have received consent to check their airplane in the U.S., transporting COVID-19 products from a depot to a medical facility in North Carolina. The practical advantage is little: the cargo is modest quantities of PPE that could have been provided by truck in about 20 minutes. This is a big offer, because it needed a waiver from the FAA for the planes to run totally autonomously and beyond visual line-of-sight– simply launch and forget. It is happening in distance to an airport no less.

The post notes it’s America’s “first drone delivery operation to be approved to fly in airspace where all air traffic is actively managed by the FAA.”

However on the other hand, another heading this week at the Washington Post tells us that Google-backed drones “will drop library books so kids in Virginia can do their summertime reading.”.
Wing, a company owned by Google moms and dad Alphabet, started delivering family goods and meals [and prescriptions] from Walgreens and regional dining establishments to a limited area of the southwest Virginia town that covers several thousand homes last October. The business has actually seen a jump in need during the pandemic as individuals are increasingly staying home and avoiding crowded spaces like supermarket, stated Keith Heyde, head of Virginia operations for Wing. The business reached a high of 1,000 deliveries internationally in a single week this spring, he said.

And they’re not the only business experimenting with drone deliveries, according to Forbes:.
UPS and CVS have likewise paired with a focus on medical items. The 2 companies are partnering to use drones to deliver prescriptions to homeowners of The Towns in Florida, one of the nation’s greatest retirement home. The deliveries originate from a CVS shop about a half mile away and mark the first paid property deliveries by UPS’s drone unit Flight Forward. The drones drop the prescriptions to a main location, where a Flight Forward employee will transport them by golf cart to houses.
Chennai, India, and Surabaya, Indonesia have actually attempted utilizing drones to spray disinfectant in congested cities. Forbes reports that around the world, “the biggest use case has actually been the deployment of drones to enforce social distancing and screen crowds.”

At least one Paris prefect complains that there’s still one problem with the drones. “Often they are attacked by birds, which error them for competitors.”