Amazon wants air space for delivery drones

A further 100ft of airspace – between 400ft and 500ft – would be declared a no-fly zone to act as a buffer between the drones and current conventional aircraft such as passenger and cargo planes, thus mitigating fears about the impact on manned flight or dangers posed to people on the ground.

“We feel this is a safe and scalable approach”, said Kimchi.

Amazon is laser-focused on the best, most efficient way to get items to customers, and it’s eager to make drones part of the solution. Amazon Prime Air could conceivably become the UPS or FedEx of the skies, taking its expertise and offering it to others for a fee as it does with AWS. At least five times this year, fire departments trying to battle wildfires in California were unable to fly their helicopters close enough to assist teams on the ground because small drones flown by ordinary citizens were in the airspace capturing footage of the blaze.

Kimchi sketched out one potentially risky situation, and how a network like the one Amazon envisions would prevent a mishap: What if a homeowner happens to be having a package delivered at the same time their real estate agent had planned to shoot a sales video of the home with a drone? Drones here would be under manual or automatic control.

Google is one of the latest companies to demonstrate a commitment to helping develop a solution, joining the likes of Amazon, Verizon, and around 10 other businesses that have signed an agreement with NASA to help create a system to ensure safe low-altitude drone flights, Bloomberg reported Friday. The 100 feet immediately above that airspace would become a no-fly zone. Consumer drones and others without sensors would be limited to the “low-speed localized traffic” zone.

Tuesday’s conference also discussed who should be allowed to fly drones and where drone flying should be permitted.

Air traffic control for the suggested drone space would be handled by an automated computer system.

Amazon was previously frustrated by the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) ban on outdoor testing of commercial drones. Amazon’s partnership with Google in the U.S. drone air control venture is a big step towards that goal – and may mean that the end of the issues caused by human delivery are in sight for the rest of us.

Even the tens of thousands of drones sold in electronics and hobby shops are sophisticated enough to be allowed into busy urban areas, so long as they update their software to let their craft be tracked, stay connected to the Internet and agree to follow the rules, he said.