Interesting accident. The two came together at pretty close to 90 degrees.
In small boats the helm is normally on the right and the airplane was coming from the boat’s left. In the plane, the pilot sits on the left and the boat was coming from the plane’s right.
Assuming passengers in the seats adjacent to the helmsman and the pilot, they might each have had their view of the other craft obstructed by people or cockpit structure. If a collision is to occur then the angular rate of the target must be zero. If it’s hidden behind a nearby obstacle to your line of sight, it’ll stay right behind there and just get bigger and bigger until the crunching noises start.
As a separate matter, things which just grow in place within your unobstructed visual field are not nearly as attention-getting as things which move across your visual field.
In any case, it seems neither made any last ditch maneuvers, so it appears to have utterly surprised both operators. Oops.
Saw this in a recent “3 minutes of aviation” video (always a good use of time, if you ignore the clickbait titles/captions). There’s no scenario in which the landing plane is justified in doing this, is there? Except maybe a hypothetical in which the runway is at the bottom of a narrow canyon with no room to turn away while going around.
It appears they forgot to either look out of the window or engage their brains, regardless of what instructions they may have had from ATC.
I find it odd that Walmart would be one of the first companies offering this. Basically you would expect that parts of health care and business would have a serious need for immediate delivery and consequently would be willing to pay big bucks for the service. So you would expect the offerings to start with companies such as Grainger or the big drug wholesalers.
If you consider the size of Wal*Mart’s delivery bill with UPS, FedEx, USPS, etc., or the cost of their own internal last-mile delivery service I can certainly see them wanting to explore any potentially lower-cost solution.
I agree that I find the idea this would be enough lower cost (or lower cost at all) to be rather far-fetched. But the cost of a pilot project is so negligible at their scale, and the potential savings so vast if it works surprisingly well makes the gamble seemingly one worth taking. Even better if they have some hope of developing something patentable where they can reap license fees from leasing out the use of their patents.
Or at least that’s the rationale I beleive is operating here.
All the major freight companies are driving hard toward the hoop on this. I would expect medical deliveries to hospitals to be the earliest examples. They will have a natural drop off point at helipads.
ISTM, much like the original motivation for FedEx in Fred Smith’s thesis, will be limited to items that are small, light weight, highly costly (or highly cost-saving), and highly time sensitive.
Which does not describe a random bag of housewares from Wal*Mart or Amazon or …
But might well describe at least some medical stuff in some cases.
Maybe. The sorts of drones they’re discussing at least for initial service have ranges of 10s of miles. Including the return trip. Not gonna be servicing the boonies w gizmos like that.
Amazon was supposed to be considering drone delivery as well. When I first heard about it some years ago, I honestly thought it was a joke. Apparently it wasn’t, but I haven’t heard any more about it recently. Amazon deliveries are beautifully automated with mapped tracking once the vehicle is close to your house, but it’s still a human driving a van and walking up to your porch with a package. Replacing that any time soon with fully robotic systems of any kind is going to be super expensive and fraught with problems.
Where I live the Amazon driver drives up in a truck loaded with a wheeled tub with ~75 packages. After parking the van in a loading zone they wheel the tub to the front door, buzz security on the intercom, then security admits the driver to the lobby. Once security agrees they look like a real amazon driver, they hand over an an elevator key and the driver toodles up, down, and around the building like the Easter bunny dropping eggs / packages at the various front doors on the various floors. Then once their sleigh cart is empty they come back to the lobby, return the key, and are buzzed out of the lobby to the sidewalk, go back to their truck, stow their cart, and drive off.
With ~700 residents who lurrve them some Amazon, we get several trucks a day of stuff. Sometimes it seems every apartment gets something every day.
In terms of simplicity / efficiency from Amazons’ POV, nothing beats delivering many thousands of dollars of stuff every day to one place. And in this high density neighborhood there is nothing unusual about my building; it’s one of many.
Good luck accomplishing that seemingly ideal mission with a drone. The proverbial “last mile” also has a “last 500 feet” that’s a killer.
This.
Their tests were all at an Amish farmhouse - wide open, no obstructions, relatively easy to deliver to.
When you have a house with trees in the yard, wires to the house, maybe a sidewalk with a turn onto the porch, & some kids playing ball in the yard it’s not gonna be as easy to get that package to where it needs to be. It’s going to be even tougher in the winter when there are no leaves on the trees & it’s dark earlier, which means it’s even harder to see those little obstructions.
I was trying to fly my drone between the marble columns of an old mansion to land it on the flat surface of teh patio recently; it’s smaller than a commercial drone & the space between the columns was 2-3 times as wide as a typical sidewalk; & there were minimal winds & still the collision avoidance was getting heebie-jeebies about the tight clearance.
My WAG is that “porch” delivery will quickly turn into “front yard … probably” delivery for much of suburbia.
OTOH, a lot of people, myself included, 20 years ago expected the whole idea of individual package delivery to homes would founder on the high cost of “individual” packaging and transport vs bulk deliveries to stores, and the expected problem of near universal porch piracy.
Yet somehow Amazon etc, have thrived and defeated all comers.
They may yet slay the “last mile by drone” dragon too. Which outcome I will salute if it occurs.
On a per minute basis, someone pushing a cart through an apartment building and delivering twenty buyers’ packages in ten minutes is more efficient than one delivery worker driving the same ten minutes to that one hypothetical Amish house to deliver that one purchase. I can see them wanting to use drones for the latter use case while leaving the former alone. Amazon is nothing if not obsessed with efficiency-per-minute type performance metrics.
On the other hand, I also read somewhere that one option for drone delivery in an apartment building would be on your exterior balcony. That’s a solution which is available by no other means, and it’s pretty damn secure. The only technical problem is mapping the correspondence between unlabeled balconies and interior numbered units, so the AI drone knows which otherwise undifferentiated location should receive the delivery.
Edit to add: on reflection, that problem would be trivial to solve by sending the buyer a QR code and asking them to print it out and tape it up somewhere visible in the balcony area.
If last-mile airborne delivery services are serious, they’ll have people who want that service put a small landing pad with a QR code wherever they want the delivery.
For my family, we have an enclosed backyard with a perfect spot.
(On preview, I see you had the same thought. I’m sure Amazon has plenty of smart people to figure it out as well.)
Future versions of us will just have a marked hole in the roof that opens to the package room. The drone can drop through the portal and leave the packages in the designated space.
This process has been thoroughly tested already, cf. Santa and chimney access to the ‘delivery’ tree.
I can fly my drone off my covered deck but I can’t fly it back on to the takeoff spot to land unless I turn collision avoidance off…& it’s both smaller than a commercial drone & doesn’t have anything hanging from it. Also, when you get to mid/high-rise buildings you can get all sorts of weird wind currents around them which makes precision even harder to do.
Again, winter is an issue; no deliveries on snowy days when your QR code is now white & fluffy.
