Drones can be a headache

Photo: science.howstuffworks.com

Switzerland has been testing the application for drones for delivering parcels. 

It is a service that has been long talked about, that lacks current regulations and is much more complex than we may initially believe.

Of course, any unmanned, autonomous aviation vehicle can be a serious threat to society but so can a seemingly harmless 26-pound drone. Particularly, as it turns out, when it crashes to the ground close to a group of kindergarten children.

As a result, the testing has ceased. The risk is too great to the lives of the people on the ground.

The Swiss Postal service has actually had two drones crash. The first deployed a ballistic parachute and landed slowly. The second chopped its ballistic parachute to pieces and landed catastrophically. 

Of course, scaling this up to autonomous flying drones with people as passengers is a whole different level of faith.

You cannot take a drone and simply scale it up to take passengers. The mechanics of a large spinning rotor are completely different than a small spinning rotor. 

E Hang, which has developed a one-person autonomous drone, recently cancelled a public demonstration because they discovered they could not control their drone in turbulent air.

Similarly a recent display of a futuristic flying car for racing, came crashing to the ground at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. 

Thankfully, nobody has been killed or seriously harmed, but the accidents have been serious enough that you can expect more regulations from the FAA as Amazon slowly moves toward supposed drone delivery of packages

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.