Boeing have built a “drone” that can carry 500 pounds. Drone? Isn’t something that big what we used to call an airplane? It is an ugly beast but reportedly took a mere three months from design to build. Now that’s agility indeed!
This development comes following Boeing’s acquisition of a firm that was building prototypes for air taxis. There are a number of commercial use-cases for drones, taxis included, that create an inevitability that our skies will soon be filled with little flying things like something out of Metropolis: pizza deliveries, Amazon drop-offs, hover-jet-packers and many more. Naturally, there are concerns that there will be chaos in the air and concerns about the potential for rogue activity over locations like prisons or airports, for example.
Traditionally, policing the skies is a job for civil aviation authorities but I am of the view the volume of drones will grow too rapidly for traditional methods to be effective. Fortunately, the business sector seems to agree. A company called Airmap is trying to create the friendly skies so that commercial applications are free-to-air (couldn’t resist) while Dedrone is ready to identify and take down the more nefarious drones that may be snooping on things they shouldn’t.
I am pleased to see the market forces coming in to deal with an emerging issue, given my concerns that civil aviation is unlikely to be able to cope. But I am not looking forward to the plague of drones that will one day soon fill our skies. Hopefully some of them are better looking than Boeing’s behemoth!