Attack of the Drones

If the beard hadn’t made this fact abundantly clear, I’d like to set the record straight: I’m a guy. As a guy and as guy readers of my column will know, there are certain rules we have to follow. Some of these rules pertain to the coolness of things. Noisy things are usually cool, like fireworks and V8s. Things which fly are cool, like helicopters and fighter jets. Flashlights and other things involving LED lights? Super cool. So how about a noisy, LED-laden, noisy thing which also lets a guy use the word “pilot” in a borderline un-ironic fashion? Drones, my dudes and dudettes. Drones are cool and they’re poised to mix in some serious usefulness with that lofty status.

Drones as we picture them have been with us for around a decade or so, with the first fully baked and successful consumer offering being released by French company “Parrot” back in 2010. While model aircraft have been around for much longer than that, Parrot’s release represented a much more accessible, easy to fly and safe experience. Not to mention cheaper, with a launch price of just $299. It paved the way for drones in general to be seen as not simply toys, but something with actual potential for useful, real world applications across multiple industries.

Skipping forward to the tail end of last year, an event occurred which highlighted an exciting use case for drone deployments. A 71 year old gentleman in the Swedish town of Trollhattan suffered a heart attack and collapsed while shoveling snow outside his home. His life was saved in part due to the rapid delivery of an AED, or Automated External Defibrillator. This delivery, which was instigated by emergency dispatchers, took around three and a half minutes from the start of the call to arrival of the life saving device. The delivery was made, in an automated fashion, by a drone. A company called Everdrone is testing the technology in a four month pilot study, covering around 200,000 Swedish residents. Luckily the 71 year old man was within that initial coverage area.

Delivering things (and not just in the medical field) is definitely the hotness when it comes to drone development in 2022. The barrier to entry here in the States is actually more regulatory than technological, with the FAA setting incredibly strict rules for commercial operations. These rules are far-reaching in what you can and can’t do, however the most problematic for delivery companies is one which says you cannot operate any drone beyond visual line of sight. If you can’t see it, you can’t fly it. Amazon and Google’s parent company Alphabet are amongst the few who have managed to secure exclusion from this rule, but they’re far from out of the woods when it comes to developing a reliable, inherently safe solution.

Seldom does the subject of drones come up without at least the mention of privacy. For me it’s always been routed in the uncertainty surrounding any new technology. I can personally attest to a drone of any real size’s noise and obnoxiousness. A person would be much less conspicuous engaging in creepy, peeping-Tom-esque pastimes using simply a car or their own two feet over something with bright flashing lights and a noise like a swarm of angry hornets. I fully support privacy being something we keep in mind when exploring ways we can utilize a drone’s benefits, but I don’t believe it should prevent progress. I for one would welcome our buzzy, flying overlords if it meant Glasgow got decent delivery times from Amazon once again.

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Richard Noble is the founder of Want For Tech, an IT company based in Glasgow.