Yorick Nicholls
lvl.3
Flight distance : 790758 ft
Vanuatu
Offline
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Good morning fellow pilots,
As the title suggests, the delivery of vaccines via drones is the subject matter. And I would greatly appreciate input from the most knowledgeable pilots of the industry.
Before I lay out my concerns, please read the follow article from today's Vanuatu Daily Post newspaper:
I find the endeavour noble and original. And I'm sure it's been trialed/done before elsewhere, even for other purposes. After all, DHL are contemplating it for parcel deliveries, or might even have already implemented it.
Anyways, back to the concerns at hand. As I understand it, consumer level drones can for the moment only be operated via line of sight. Not so much for controls, but more importantly for feedback of data and imagery. Satelitte control, is not accessible to common folk and isn't reliable for rapid data feedback. At least not for this application I read in an article. The pre-programming of a drone I believe can only aid with flight paths (waypoints) but ultimately I don't see how one could pre-program a drone to land and take-off at/from X location. That's the main concern. On top of this, Vanuatu is riddled with wild vegetation, meaning without the aid of human controls it is likely many drones will experience signal issues, followed by craches from impact with fauna due to poor positioning or tropical winds.
If one was to rely on line of sight alone thus manual controls, here again vegetation would cause issues. As tree lines are very high and dense, which would almost always cause a loss of signal before a drone could even touch ground. Let alone be 5m from it.
I'm wanting to lend my knowledge to the Vanuatu GOV to ensure they don't get sidetracked over this. Ultimately I won't be able to participate as I aim to depart by end of 2017.
What do you folks think?
Cheers,
Yorick Nicholls
Daisy The Drone
www.daisythedrone.com
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