This is vaporware. It's being announced by a lame duck government who want to point at something in the future and say the equivalent of 'I took steps to ... invent the internet'.
If this actually consists of anything at all it is funding for a research project without commercial demand. Just announcing "we are giving free money to the arms industry so they don't have to pay for their own R&D" doesn't play well any more so it gets spun as part of The Future.
In addition to my previous comments, if there's actual demand this means that the NHS is currently paying a higher fee per delivery which should allow a private competitor to step in, undercut the current system (whether via drone deliveries or otherwise) and make a profit. It doesn't have to be limited to the NHS even - there are plenty of other applications that would benefit from faster & more flexible logistics powered by drones. Yet it isn't happening, suggesting the current system is already in its optimal state.
>Yet it isn't happening, suggesting the current system is already in its optimal state.
I don't follow. A gap not filled is not evidence of no gap.
I can think of several companies/industries/products where people said "It's as optimal as it gets!" and then Netflix/Dropbox/Uber/Pick-X-Tech-Company gets invented and makes things more optimal or changes the game completely. They also make all the people who say "our current system is in it's optimal state" look silly.
The Netflix/Dropbox/Uber/Pick-X-Tech-Company tried and failed too - Amazon and others did a big push for drone delivery at larger scales a few years ago with a huge bankroll and tech light-years away from a government-sponsored project and even they couldn't make it work.
A classic, classic move in the UK when you want to get govt money to do something of marginal or negative social value is to find some way of 'helping the NHS'.
Take a look at Greensill Capital. They were running a politically exposed shadow bank with terrible risk controls. They hired a former Prime Minister to sell a project which would 'lend NHS staff their salaries mid month'.
Not vaporware, however, not ready for scaling up on to an industrial scale. The main concern remains safety in case of a malfunction. Until that has been addressed, the main benefit seems to be delivery of essentials (e.g. cancer medications) to remote areas where the drone can fly mostly over uninhabited areas.
we already have motorcyclists for this - there are Blood Bike volunteers in most counties. They carry blood, organs, samples, supplies, etc much faster than even a car on blue lights. And it's cheap :)
Vapourware is when someone promises to meet a need with no intention of doing so. The fact there might be at least some need for this doesn't mean it isn't vapourware.
I'm not sure about that definition. I think it includes people who genuinely believe they will meet the need, but it's obvious to a knowledgeable observer that they won't succeed. E.g. Elisabeth Holmes, Elon Musk (self driving and mars colonization, not landing rockets).
> There is a demand for fast transportation of medical supplies [emphasis mine]
Is there really?
I understand that for non-fungible, perishable goods such as organs or test samples there might be a need (though a helicopter would do just as well), but when it comes to supplies, it will be significantly cheaper to just make more of them and stock up on them at each hospital rather than moving them back & forth (not to mention that this particular trial only ranged for 40 miles - this is something a car can easily do).
It won't work unless it's cheaper than the alternatives, and I can't see it being cheaper than just optimizing logistics elsewhere to ensure you have a big enough stock of medical supplies to not need regular drone deliveries (and when you do, a helicopter is an adequate backup plan).
It's very very easy to be cheaper than a helicopter. Drones can require zero or minimal labor, move fast, and run on electricity.
If we can have them carry a decent weight and have good reliable ways to get them from and to where they need to go, they will revolutionize delivery. Door dash will be obsolete.
Ad-hoc drones being able to take off, fly and land anywhere? Sure, at least in theory. In practice, even Amazon and various well-funded, profit-driven players couldn’t make it work (drone delivery was very hyped up ~5 years ago) so I have no expectation that an incompetent government will achieve anything other than getting fleeced by consultancies.
In addition, the Amazon/DoorDash model isn’t even what we’re talking about here - this is a predefined, specific route with the last mile still handled by conventional vehicles, so it is even worse.
You are generally want to have corridors so that you know where the drones are going to be, so you wouldn't just unrestrict everything, you'd have specific paths that the drones need to take to and from their destinations, like roads on the ground.
You don't leave it free space because then you have all sorts of drones whizzing around in all sorts of random and uncontrolled directions and that creates a lot of clutter that will cause crashing.
Given the current U.K. government’s penchant for announcing and re-announcing major projects that turn out to be less than nothing, you’d have hoped that journalists would have got a bit more sceptical. But no.
My ex-boss is involved in the project to get organs delivered fast via drones that were basically just flying minifridges. This might be pretty useful for that.
If you think transporting organs by car is a solution, then yeah, very much solved. But organs degrade every minute, so even a little speed up is very much worth it.
They transport them by motorbike at the moment, just because they can skip traffic much better.
But yes, quick delivery for organs is great - if this is enough commercial demand to make a drone superhighway worthwile/viable though is another question. Also these drone superhighways drop at a specific point at the end of the highway - so you still need to pick it up from the superhighway 'Skyway hub' and get it to the end customer.
When I looked at the Coventry Skyway project last it looked like it was started by a team who had nearly no experience in aviation or logistics so it did make me a bit sus.
Same with blood, when you need it you really need it.
There is an awesome (volunteer) organisation in the UK called Blood Bikes[1] that operate all over the UK.
The training is pretty intensive, it's something I'm considering doing after I get a full license (and 2 years and advanced) because it's an amazing thing to do.
I have a medical helicopter flying over my house roughly every second day and that's more than enough. If all the cars marked as "organ transport" that I see around here went by helicopter instead I wouldn't be able to hear my GF talking at home... And of course - the cost and emissions, and the inability to land at small fields...
I don't see how a big, bulky, human-piloted helicopter could be in any way better than a specialized, lightweight unmanned vehicle.
I bet the money that will be wasted on this project (before it inevitable get shelved) will be way more than the costs of just buying out the land affected by the noise from helicopter organ transport so people that are bothered by it can move (and maybe resell the land at a discount to those who don't mind the noise, whether it's due to better soundproofing or converting it to office space that wouldn't mind it).
Yes, in the very long run, drone transport for these things would be better due to emissions/etc, but IMO the country has more pressing problems at the moment.
I live in the centre of a capital city. Not even the state could get enough money to buy the affected land here.
> Yes, in the very long run, drone transport for these things would be better due to emissions/etc, but IMO the country has more pressing problems at the moment.
A country always has thousands of more pressing problems, the issue is that nobody orders them the same way. The best you can do is to solve more than one problem at a time.
For what it’s worth, a lot of vehicles marked “organ transport” are just people trying to avoid speeding tickets and aggressive behavior from other drivers.
At current situation, reliability of transport. Drones may be 99% reliable (making up the number), but thats not enough when that 1% means somebody on waiting list is going to die due to failed transport.
Costs benefits are obvious but there are always drawbacks, especially when every fail may mean 1 dead person.
And that you bought your property so badly placed is unfortunate, but the result of your own choices (or more like lack of thorough research). If you bought it next to highway so should all car traffic in the area be banned?
But that's the point - this would enable new use cases, like for example performing emergency organ replacement at a smaller hospital, when transport is too dangerous for the person, or when a helicopter is not available.
Also, you might be transporting organs from a smaller place to a big hospital - donors that got into an accident probably didn't take care to have it near a helipad.
Organ transport might be a good application. That doesn't mean that we should allow drones for any other types of application without thinking it over very thoroughly.
And let's not forget to tax the damage they cause in terms of pollution. Keeping things in the air requires way more energy than moving them over land. And there are other negative externalities (noise and visual pollution), and also physical danger (these things might crash or collide).
> And let's not forget to tax the damage they cause in terms of pollution. Keeping things in the air requires way more energy than moving them over land.
What are you comparing this to? Does this include the energy and pollution needed to move a human, and a vehicle to safely accommodate that human?
> And there are other negative externalities (noise and visual pollution), and also physical danger (these things might crash or collide).
Are these not also the case for human-driven vehicles, which endanger more people (if a motorbike crashes then the rider has low odds), and create noise and visual pollution? I assume the latter means "I don't like how it looks"; if so then does a road look nicer than a drone your eye can't resolve unless you're fairly close to it?
Air transportation can only compete with cars in terms of pollution when a lot of mass is transported (e.g. for an aircraft with 300 passengers versus a 4-person car, pollution per passenger is about equal). For small transport, cars win by a large margin.
Drone delivery itself isn't vaporware, and will almost certainly happen. However, the title referring to "the biggest drone superhighway" is the kind of BS the current UK government likes to put out. I am surprised it isn't sold as some kind of direct benefit of Brexit. If you read the article, it is about a small amount of funding to scale up trial drone delivery. As the article implies a lot more research and investment is needed to scale up drone deliveries to an industrial scale, beyond isolated success stories.
It will be delivered right after the bridge to ireland, or the garden in the middle of the thames or the oven ready brexit deal we are all waiting for...
This is a really good idea and I'm eager to see how it works out. Quadcopters can't fly that high and I think if they flew willy-nilly all over the place it would be a noise/privacy issue.
Requiring "highways", say over the access roads of actual highways, would be a big win on many fronts.
I think that would be problematic - there would be a significant proportion of downed drones, whether by mechanical failure, bird strike, overhead cables, bridges, battery outages, etc.
It would be particularly dangerous for drivers to have random drone drops over highways.
If we tried to site the highways elsewhere, how many people would complain about noise over their gardens or houses? How many enterprising people with slingshots would make a sport out of downing drones? In the UK we have NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) and BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody) who would besiege the local councils with objections and cause havoc for planners.
I agree with the top comment, this is spurious vaporware that's been ejaculated out of some government-affiliated think tank with no actual plan for feasibility, delivery or value.
If they're too dangerous to fly over public roads all the time it's problematic to put them over people and houses on private property instead. (Leaving aside noise issues.) I imagine drones will have their place to do urgent deliveries especially where there aren't roads. But they suffer from the same problem that other heavier than air craft do (e.g. flying cars), their failure mode is falling out of sky on top of things--even with safety systems like parachutes.
> In the UK we have NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) and BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody) who would besiege the local councils with objections and cause havoc for planners.
I immediately had to think of Minions and their characteristic of well intentions disrupting their boss's plans when reading BANANAs...
To get back to topic - here in Germany, we have introduced a special law, the "Maßnahmengesetz" [1], to bypass the usual permit processes and NIMBY/BANANA bullshit for twelve major infrastructure process. Basically, the law is explicitly saying that the projects in its scope are of major national/european importance, have been decided upon democratically and so do not need additional layers of checks and balances. Unfortunately, the EU Commission decided in all its glory that this idea of short-cutting the NIMBYs is a violation of EU law and so everything is under question again [2]
The UK has a special arrangement for nationally significant infrastructure projects. They are decided by a public enquiry rather than local authorities and can use powers like compulsory purchase.
The trouble with the NIMBY/BANANA labels is it basically amounts to saying "you care about something I don't care about". I know it's hard to believe, but other people do have different interests than you.
"Drones" in this context probably means more like "light unmanned fixed-wing aircraft" than quadcopters. Same type of machines that are used to drop bombs.
The UK loves the word 'superhighway'. They usually fail. We had 'cycle superhighways' in London, started while Livingstone was Mayor and then left to basically rot under Johnson's term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cycle_routes_in_London
The Royal Mail drone scheme to the Western Isles of Scotland is much needed. Currently we depend on Loganair and other chartered flights to carry mail to remote islands in Scotland.
This will enable deliveries more frequently and less dependant on the human factor, although weather will still be a limiting one.
As a developer living on a remote island currently, its been amazing to see technology even as ubiquitous as 4G help fish farms, wind turbines and other communications work much better.
I suppose this is an extension of air space zoning, which is a thing already. The 3D space above our head is carved up into different bits, with different rules, optimised for the principal user. Rules around major airports are optimised for big airline jets, whereas rules around small rural airstrips are optimised for hobbyists.
It makes sense to create more zones if there is a new use-case. Designated corridors for drones is basically sandboxing.
That said, as a sibling comment says, this is coming from a government under liquidation, staffed by a party behind in polls - their objective probably isn't Making Airspace Great Again.
No mention of how any lorries this will take off the roads. So what's this for? To make buying unnecessary shit from Amazon even cheaper? This just seems like a way to squeeze this small island even more. There's already barely anywhere you can go outside without any noise pollution. I guess we can say good bye to those places too.
> There's already barely anywhere you can go outside without any noise pollution
Found the Londoner haha. 2 minutes from me is a walk where I can do an easy 6 miles without seeing or hearing anything but nature (maybe a few dog walkers). Even at that 6 mile mark it's just a lil village then more nature.
Come up north if you're starving for silence! A lot of villages are connected by old railway lines (rails removed), they make for great peaceful walks.
In any case I don't disagree with you. I do hope there's no stream of drones one day buzzing along, I might have to get into slingshottery.
I live in a small, boring town and regularly walk in the countryside. I think our definition of silence is different. Even in the north of the Peak District you'll get planes from Manchester airport. Everywhere else you'll hear loud cars/motorbikes from every direction. There are pockets of quiet, but it's very difficult to find true silence in Britain now. In any case, my point was really that these last few pockets are now at risk.
A lot of the UK is actually pretty empty. You can often go a couple miles of the main road and you barely see anyone for hours. Obviously that tranquillity is something that should be protected. But I don't think a few drones will change that. The big problem is that people are stuck in the busy areas and don't have good access to the empty bits.
I don't expect many people will begrudge the occasional urgent medical delivery. What a lot of people don't want is the sky full of buzzing hardware delivering takeout burgers.
If you watch the radar you notice patterns with helicopters over London - there are vary distinct routes in the sky that they follow. Along the thames, and along the M3 / M40.
So seems an obvious extension of this sort of thing really.
Monumentally stupid idea: as our "civilized world" devolves, these will be bored moron target practice, as well as perfect targets for commercial disruption. The short sightedness and immaturity of human society knows no bounds, it's a black hole.
Nothing because it's a nonsense government press release "project" that will likely never happen, and if it does happen it won't be because politicians helped in any way.
My drive to work each morning involves travelling on a stretch of rural road which is about 6 miles long with no boundaries stopping animals such as cows, horses and donkeys wandering into the path of speeding cars. The limit is 40mph but it's mostly ignored.
As a consequence, around 40 such beasts are killed each year because the majority of people believe their need to drive at 20% above any given limit (for no other reason than satisfying their fragile egos) outweighs the lives and welfare of innocent animals.
So who's going to care less for the lives of a few birds when delivery of random crap from amazon is given priority?
> majority of people believe their need to drive at 20% above any given limit
It’s almost endorsed legally afaik. We were even taught this “rule” at school
The insane speeding on tight country roads in the UK is absolutely bizarre. It’s in no way safe but everyone does it. My friends dad died on a motorcycle by riding around country roads too fast. It should really be a 30 limit, even 20 considering the visibility, but people drive at 60, even along single file roads that require you to reverse if you come across an oncoming car
And at this time of year you're quite likely to meet a house-sized tractor or combine coming round the bend. Those don't hang around either! I'm amazed there aren't a lot more fatal accidents on country roads.
Most roads in the UK were co-opted from farm tracks and never really designed for cars. A lot of the grading of roads is just wishful thinking and not linked to the engineering specification of the road. And people are constantly surprised that the road they have spent the last ten years driving to work on is not an eight lane freeway.
Ah - slightly more rural than my part of the south east. I guess I see one deer every two years run over. The rest of the time it is mostly rabbits and badgers with the occasional fox. Hedgehogs not so much now they are rarer in the UK.
If this actually consists of anything at all it is funding for a research project without commercial demand. Just announcing "we are giving free money to the arms industry so they don't have to pay for their own R&D" doesn't play well any more so it gets spun as part of The Future.