Droning about Drone Regulations

Recently, Alphabet company Wing received FAA approval for Air Carrier status. What does that mean? And what are the regulations about drones?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works and I heart radio and I love
all things tech. And On April twenty third, two thousand nineteen,

(00:25):
Bloomberg reported that Wing Aviation l C, which is a
company under Alphabet that's the same parent company that Google
belongs to, had received f A A approval for air
carrier certification. This was important news because Wing is in
the drone business with the goal of making drone deliveries

(00:45):
a reality. In other words, deliveries made by drone, not
deliveries of drones to people, and this is a goal
to make it a reality in the United States. So
today I thought I would talk about drones and the
laws and regular elations for drone operations in the United
States in particular, and a little bit about other places
as well, and why this certification was a necessary step

(01:09):
for Wings plans to come to fruition. First, I think
it might be good to define some terms. See the
word drone is a bit vague. In the broad sense.
We tend to think of drones as unmanned aircraft or
unmanned aerial vehicles u a v s. They can range
from something that can land on the palm of your

(01:29):
hand to something that if it landed on you would
give you the Wicked Witch of the East treatment because
you'd get squished, because they can get real big. But
the technical definition for a drone, or at least a
a modern definition for a drone is that it is
an unmanned, fixed wing or multi rotor aircraft and it
might draw power through fuel combustion engine or through batteries,

(01:54):
and for consumer drones, the battery option is by far
the most common, but typically when we use the word drone,
we're thinking of multi rotor unmanned aircraft, and frequently there
are ones that we pilot using a remote control system.
The most common version you tend to see in the
consumer market is the quad copter form factor, where you

(02:16):
have a set of rotors at what would be the
four corners of the drone, and it helps produce stability.
These systems are are pretty phenomenal works of technology. Microchips
and sensors work to keep the drones nice and stable.
They can make fine tuned adjustments to operations and that
helps keep the drones in air. So some drone drones

(02:39):
will allow pilots to actually kind of tweak those settings
and give a little more control over to human operators.
But to make drones appealing to the masses, it was
imperative to create hardware and software that would allow the
average person to fly one around without having to monitor
a dozen different variables at once. If you start seeing
the back right corner and go down, then you're adjusting
for that. You might overcorrect and next thing you know,

(03:01):
your drones flipping out. So the technology got to the
point where that wasn't necessary, where that could be automated. Now.
I've done episodes about drone technology in the past, including
talking about how DARPA was very much involved with drones,
particularly during the Vietnam War, but I'm not going to
spend a whole lot of time doing that here. I
just want to touch on the fact that companies have

(03:22):
developed the technology to a point that allows anyone with
a little patients to operate a drone fairly easily. And
doing so safely and responsibly is another matter, and that's
where regulations will come in. Now. To understand the evolution
of regulations It's also important to have a quick overview
of drone history because this is another one of those
examples where technology develops faster than governments can handle. Now,

(03:47):
technically the term drone has been used to describe any
unmanned aerial vehicle in the past. The actual term would
start to come up probably I think it's more or
less like the World War One era, but we've used
the word to apply to things even older than that.
That includes balloons, which represent the earliest drones. Again, we

(04:09):
didn't call them that at the time, but that's what
we'd call him now. As early as eighteen forty nine,
militaries were experimenting with unmanned balloons as explosive delivery systems
or bombers, so they're using balloons to bomb targets. The
Austrian military use such bomb carrying balloons against the city
of Venice. At the time, Austria was controlling much of

(04:32):
the surrounding area and they were laying siege to the city.
The bombs had timed fuses that were cut to a
length that would give the balloon enough time to reach
its target before exploding, and it was mostly based off
environmental conditions at the time. So you'd say, based on
the direction of the wind and its speed, we calculate

(04:53):
that it will take x number of minutes to get
to where we want to go, so we'll cut the
fuse to this link. Now, some of the bombs did
have a pesky habit of blowing back toward the Austrians,
and that was not ideal. The Venetians would surrender to
the Austrians a couple of days after those attacks, but
the lack of control over the balloons and flight was

(05:15):
a big reason that other countries did not immediately jump
on board and employ the same strategy. The first fixed
wing pilotless drone recorded in history was probably the Rustin
Proctor aerial target, which was developed in nineteen sixteen. That's
just sixteen years after the Right Brothers had a successful
demonstration of heavier than air fixed wing aircraft at Kittie Hawk. Now,

(05:39):
there are a lot of sites that have information about
this particular automated aircraft, well not even automated, it's not automated,
but remote controlled radio control aircraft. But they all used
suspiciously similar wording in those articles. So in other words,
I think they're all either working from the exact same
source material which is being kind might just be copying

(06:01):
each other. Suffice it to say, the aerial target relied
on simplistic radio controls. In fact, calling it a remote
control is probably being way too generous. Uh. And it
was intended to be used like a flying bomb, but
it was never actually used in combat. The realities of
World War One gave countries a lot of incentives to
develop drones. Being able to attack an opponent without putting

(06:24):
the lives of your own soldiers in danger was obviously
a goal for everybody. The designs in World War One
really led more to the development of cruise missiles than
the evolution of the end landed aerial vehicle or ua V. Now,
between the two World Wars, countries began to experiment with
various unmanned aerial vehicles as targets, much as the aerial

(06:49):
target name had suggested. So you would have pilots in
manned aircraft practicing their their firing, practicing their their targeting
on these aerial target it's that were unmanned. There was
no fear of endangering another pilot because there's no pilot
in the enemy aircraft, and it gave pilots a chance
to hone their skills without putting other people in danger,

(07:11):
so it became a training method. These aerial targets were
typically made through converting full sized aircraft UH into radio
controlled aircraft, rather than building something specifically for the purposes
of being an unmanned vehicle from the first place. Now,
according to at least one story, this is where the
word drone actually came from. It was applied to a

(07:34):
ua V called the d H point eight to B
also known as the Queen B. And UH they started
using the drone to describe this particular aircraft, and then
later they used it to describe any aerial target, and
later still to refer to any remotely controlled unmanned aerial vehicle.
And that's where we got the word drone, at least

(07:56):
according to a lot of sites I found on the internet. UH,
I am not confident that that is the correct answer,
but we're gonna go with it because it was the
one one I found consensus on. Now I'm gonna switch
gears a bit and talk about a dude called Reginald
Denny who was an English actor who immigrated to America

(08:17):
to seek fame and fortune in Hollywood. And he would
do that He acted in dozens of roles, though I
think I've only ever seen him in two movies. He
was in the nineteen sixty six version of Batman Some
Days you just can't get rid of a bomb. And
he was also a bad guy in the Western comedy
film Cat Balou, which holds a near and dear place

(08:39):
to my heart. Anyway, he had another interest besides acting,
and that was of remote control airplanes. He had been
in the Royal Flying Corps the RFC in Britain during
World War One, and he had performed as a stunt
pilot after that. So when he came to America, he
created a company called Reginald Denny Industries, and and he

(09:00):
started to design and build remote controlled aircraft, and he
did some for the military, but he also did other
ones for hobbyists and amateur pilots. He's widely cited as
the first person to create a model plane business, a
radio control model plane business. I should add because there
were other businesses that made model planes. It's just they

(09:22):
were either gliders, or they were just models that weren't
meant to fly at all, or they were tethered, so
they would you would tie them to an anchor point
and they would just fly in circles. Oh and one
other bit of trivia. Another famous person in Hollywood got
her start as an assembler in one of Denny's manufacturing facilities.
That actress's name was Norma Gene Mortenson, but she's better

(09:45):
known by her stage name Marilyn Monroe. While Denny was
catering to a small and fairly wealthy clientele of r
C pilots, it would take the development of the transistor
and making the transistor cheap and to produce to really
give the hobbyist community a big boost. And that happened
in the nineteen sixties, and it allowed manufacturers to make

(10:08):
much smaller radio controlled components for aircraft and also meant
that the aircraft themselves could be smaller. So soon dozens
of companies were producing different types of aircraft, often in
kit form, which means you would go out and buy
the kit and you would assemble the aircraft at home.
Now I should add that there had been model aeroplane

(10:29):
associations and competitions since before Denny had even created his business,
but those were essentially free form competitions in which the
aircraft is not controlled during flight. So a glider is
an example. Or aircraft that uses a rubber band to
store and then unleash energy. Uh, that was another example.

(10:50):
Or they were the tethered version before radio control really
came on the scene in the nineteen sixties. As the
transistor was taking shape, so was the concept of aircraft
regulations in the US. And I'm talking about full sized
aircraft regulations UM and manned aircraft as well. In ninety eight,

(11:11):
the United States formed the Federal Aviation Administration. Originally it's
called the Federal Aviation Agency. Either way, it was called
the f a A still is to this day the
f a A. And the purpose of it was to
oversee the development and enforcement of regulations for aircraft. And
there had been several fatal accidents that involved aircraft over
the previous decades, some of those involving high profile people,

(11:34):
including a US senator in nineteen thirty five. Now, previously,
the Department of Commerce had been charged with administering and
regulating the use of aircraft, but technology was progressing quickly,
and as air travel and cargo transportation became more accessible,
the country began to rely rely upon air travel much
more heavily, and that led to the need to create

(11:56):
a new government agency to oversee everything. Senator A. S.
Mike Munroney from Oklahoma introduced a bill to create the
f a A and it had the mission to provide
quote for the safe and Efficient use of National Airspace
end quote. Now would be a while before the f
a A turned its attention to u a v s,

(12:16):
largely because there just weren't that many u a v
s out there to worry about it. Plus, hobbyist organizations
were trying to be proactive, so they were creating their
own sets of rules and guidelines for operation, and part
of that was in an effort to stay ahead of
the need for regulations, which many thought would end up
hurting the hobby as a whole. If you have to

(12:38):
start regulating things, you discourage people from getting involved in it.
So they're kind of hoping to head that off at
the pass and say, well, we're just going to make
sure that everyone is knows how to behave and operate
these things so that we don't have the government get involved.
And because again it was a relatively small number of people,

(12:58):
there wasn't much concern at least for a few decades.
There was one other federal agency that hobbyists and companies
catering to hobbyists had to pay attention to, and that
was the f c C, which is authorized to designate
radio frequencies for specific types of use. So radio controlled
vehicles fall into the same category as amateur radio, and

(13:22):
so all our C vehicles have to operate within the
amateur radio bandwidths of radio frequencies. Other frequency bandwidths are
meant for different purposes, So for example, television broadcast is
one of those where military use takes up several different bandwidths.
We'll get back to the FCC a bit later, because
there's a complication that arises it if you want to

(13:43):
use a ua V for commercial purposes. Um that the
f c C overseas alright, So for years r C
pilots didn't really have to worry about regulations as long
as they followed the guidelines that the various hobbyist organizations had.
A STAF published in the f a A issued an

(14:04):
advisory Circular on Model Aircraft Operating Standards, and these were
a list of safety standards that the f a A
advised model aircraft operators to follow. They were pretty straightforward
rules that broke down into the following. Don't operate a
model aircraft near populated and noise sensitive areas. Don't operate
a model aircraft in front of spectators until you've established

(14:25):
that the aircraft is actually air worthy through some flight testing.
Don't fly higher than four feet in altitude. If you
do want to fly a model aircraft within three miles
of an airport, you have to first notify the air
traffic facility or air traffic control tower first. UM I
think I said first there twice, But that's how important
it was. You were to give right of way to

(14:47):
any full scale aircraft and avoid flying in their proximity
whenever possible, and you were encouraged to talk with air
traffic control to help in your planning to comply with
those rules. And that was it, and it stayed that
way for a couple of decades. I'll talk about what
happened next in just a moment, but first let's take
a quick break. So as we know, technology continues to evolve,

(15:15):
and as tech evolves, it tends to become more accessible,
both because prices for that tech will drop and the
tech also gets easier to use. So what was once
a complicated task becomes more automated, and that means more
people can get involved in that activity without encountering a
very steep learning curve, and they don't have to develop
the same sort of skill that earlier hobbyists had to

(15:38):
develop in order to be active in that hobby. Flying
an RC plane before the development of automated technologies required
a whole lot of skill and focus. It's much easier
to fly a quad copter with automatic leveling capabilities. In fact,
it's hard to describe the difference. I've operated an RC

(15:58):
airplane before, and once it's in the air, it's not
that hard to control it, but it's a little tricky
if you want to bring it down safely. I always
had to hand the controls over to someone who is
more capable than I to do that. I could do
basic maneuvers, I couldn't do anything fancy. UM quad copters

(16:19):
are very different because it automates a lot of the
features that keeps the aircraft steady in the air as
you're giving it different commands, So you've given a lot
more freedom to do wacky stuff and not have to
worry so much about the aircraft having a total crash.
Now the technology advanced much faster than the law did,
which again it's pretty common in technology. We'd see it

(16:41):
in other areas, not just in things like transportation. We
see it pretty much everywhere where. Innovators come up with
a new idea that the law it really hasn't accounted
for yet, and then we see the law try to
catch up with the state of the art tech. But
that takes time, and it takes a while for regulators
to kind of suss out the details to sort of
caught a by them into rules and regulations. Now, the

(17:03):
popularity of drones inevitably led to several cases in which
the unmanned vehicles caused concern, including several near miss scenarios
with full scale aircraft near airports. So the f a
A recognized the situation was urgent that these drones were
just going to keep getting more and more popular, which

(17:23):
meant more of them in the air, which meant more
opportunities for disaster to occur. So the agency needed to
jump in on this point. Now, at first, the f
a A tried to enforce rules for actual aircraft that
and have them applied to u a v s, and
they concluded that unmanned aerial systems or u A S s s,

(17:44):
which essentially the same thing as U A V S
is just another name for it, are legally designated as aircraft,
and that would mean that all operators would have to
follow f a A rules and get certified to operate
their vehicles. The f A wanted to classify U A
S devices as aircraft under the Code of Federal Regulations,
specifically as defined in Part one oh three, which is

(18:07):
the section for ultra light vehicles. However, as defined, ultra
light vehicles are manned vehicles that either way less than
one fifty five pounds if they're unpowered, or two hundred
fifty four pounds if they are powered. That's around seventy
ms for unpowered and a little more than a hundred
and ten kilograms for powered aircraft. So when the f

(18:30):
a A attempted to prosecute cases centered on irresponsible and
dangerous operation of u AS vehicles using these rules as
their basis, that's where they encountered some problems. The case
went to the court system of the National Transportation Safety Board,
but the NTSB rejected the f A A S case

(18:52):
on the grounds that u AS vehicles do not meet
the definition of an ultra light aircraft. They said, you
can't apply the rules for this thing for this other thing.
There are two different things. So a lot of the
charges were dismissed, but there were a couple that did stick.
The court held up a charge involving operating drones within
controlled airspaces like a near an airport, so the f

(19:14):
a A had no legal justification to take operators to
court even if they were acting irresponsibly, so the agency
had limited authority. It was pretty clear that the f
a A could have the right to regulate operations within
controlled airspace, and that the f a A could establish
the right to regulate pilots and drone airworthiness. But some operations,

(19:37):
such as the indoor operation of drones, were deemed to
be completely outside the f a AS authority. They couldn't
say anything about how you operate a drone indoors. Now,
the f a A would go and draft a new
set of rules under Part one zero seven. This would
be small unmanned aircraft systems, so they drafted specific rules

(19:58):
to cover these devices since they did not fit on
the ultra light category. This would set the actual rules
that the f a A could actively enforce, and the
rules not only created the safe parameters for drone operation.
It also gave commercial U a S operators the legal
foundation upon which they could pursue their careers. Because commercial
U a S operators UH have to follow rules as well,

(20:22):
and they're different rules than recreational drone users. You might
wonder what a professional u a S operator is doing.
A lot of them are camera operators because a lot
of film projects end up meeting drone shots. They can
replace helicopter shots or crane shots, so you can see
them a lot in the entertainment and information industries, and

(20:43):
this was a way for people to actually make that
a living. Now, the rules states the drone operators have
to maintain a line of sight with their vehicles while
they're operating them outdoors. So you could not use a
camera and monitor system to pilot your your drone out
of sight. So you couldn't just go beyond line of sight.

(21:04):
With these these rules in place, the pilot has to
be able to lay eyes on the drone at all times. UH. Also,
the operators are to fly the drones at an altitude
ceiling of four hundred feet or a hundred twenty two.
That's the same as for the model airplanes, so that
didn't change. Another restriction states that you can't fly your
drone over human beings unless those people are undercover, So

(21:28):
if the drone were to follow the sky, wouldn't hurt anybody. Uh.
The only exception to this is if you are the
actual pilot of the drone, you can fly it over yourself,
but you're not allowed to fly it over anyone else.
That would become a big restriction for commercial drones, as
we'll talk about a bit later. The vehicles also can't
be carrying hazardous material, so you can't have you know,
like biological agents or chemical agents or things like that

(21:50):
are explosives on a drone that's illegal, and pilots are
limited to operating only a single aircraft at any given time.
There are also other rules that are involved with this,
but that's those are the general ones for recreational drone use.
In addition, if a ua V weighs more than point
to five kgrams or about point five five pounds, the

(22:12):
operator is required to register the drone. In the United States,
operators have to be at least thirteen years old in
order to register a drone. If they are younger than that,
they can have a quote unquote responsible adult do it
in their place. So you don't have to be thirteen
to operate a drone, but you have to be at
least thirteen to register a drone. The registration fee is

(22:32):
five dollars. It's good for three years, so it's not
prohibitively expensive. You know, drones are already pretty expensive, so
that's the limiting factor. I would argue more than the
registration fee. These rules are again just for recreational use.
They don't apply to people who are piloting drones for profit.
And starting in two thousand and six, the f a
A began to issue commercial drone permits. This gets complicated

(22:55):
because operating a drone commercially is in violation of those
f c C regulations I talked about, because the f
c C regulations state that you can only use those
amateur radio bands for amateur use. You cannot use it
to make a profit. That's you know, there are different
frequencies that are reserved for commercial use. So technically, if

(23:22):
you're making a living operating a drone, you can get
permission from the f a A to do it, but
the actual radio frequencies you're using to control the drone
have to be over amateur radio frequencies and that technically
is in violation of the FCC rules. That being said,
I am not aware of any cases in which the
f c C came up against a drone operator and

(23:44):
said you're not allowed to do that because you're making
money and these frequencies have been reserved just for amateur use.
But technically it is against the rules. Maybe that means
that one day we'll see the rules get some adjustment,
but uh, yeah, it's an interesting issue that I guess
isn't really an issue because if no one's pressing the matter,

(24:06):
it doesn't ultimately mean anything. But technically it is against
the rules. So on average, once the f a A
started to issue commercial drone permits in two thousand and six,
it was issuing them at a rate of two per
year for about eight years. Now. That was not because

(24:27):
the f a A was being particularly picky with who
got a drone permit to operate a drone commercially, It
was just because the demand was super low, not a
lot of people were requesting these certifications. However, that did
change dramatically in uh the f a went from doing
about two a year to doing a thousand permits. In

(24:49):
the following year, it more than tripled the number of permits,
so it's more than three thousand at that point. And
this is kind of in line with the rise in
quality of drones in general, as well as the camera
equipment aboard drones. So now you started to see, you know,
higher resolution cameras get attached to drones around this time,
so there were more uses, commercial potential, commercial uses for drones.

(25:14):
So as the camera's improved, interest in drone permits increased
and more filmmakers and producers began incorporating drone footage in
their works. But the rules as written would prohibit certain operations.
No company would be able to use drones to deliver
packages under the U A V Rules in Part Part
one oh seven. In order to get that permission, a

(25:36):
company would have to take some extra steps. So, yeah,
you can operate a drone to shoot movies. You could
do that, and you can make a profit despite the
FCC guidelines. But you couldn't use a drone to carry
a package to a customer in the United States because
the f A rules would prohibit that. So the first
proposals to use drones for delivery started popping up in

(26:00):
that's when Amazon's Jeff Bezos showed news correspondent Charlie Rose
a project that was codenamed Prime Air still is to
this day. This program would have drones called octocopters, carrying
packages through the sky to customers homes, and it was
a big surprise to the television crew that was there
to shoot an interview with Bezos, and was a huge

(26:21):
unveiling to the world at large. The goal was to
speed up delivery considerably. So ideally, here's how this would unfold.
A customer would hit by on the Amazon site for
some small product. That would send a message to a
nearby order fulfillment center, and there the order would be
prepared and placed in a small yellow bucket, and then

(26:43):
a drone could come by and pick up the little
yellow bucket and then fly to the correct destination, setting
down the package and getting the product into the customer's
hands within a half hour of their ordering it. So
it was a pretty revolutionary idea, particularly for two thousand thirteen.
Bezos estimate it would take probably four to five years
to really perfect the technology and get regulations in place

(27:05):
to make it a viable service. It's now six years
after that, and that hasn't happened yet, but a different
company did close the gap. More on that in just
a second. But since Amazon's reveal, a few different companies,
including Amazon, have attempted to run some limited programs to
research the feasibility of delivery drones. They had to be
limited in the US because the f a A was

(27:27):
still working out how to regulate the practice, and the
rules for recreational use were too restrictive for a practical
delivery drone. Ideally, you'd want a largely automated system, which
means the operator might not even be a human being.
It might be a computer system. But if you did
have a human pilot, you'd probably want that person to
be stationed in the headquarters and operating the vehicle via
remote control and using onboard cameras for visual information fed

(27:52):
back to monitors in front of the pilot. But that
violates the line of site rule that recreational pilots have
to follow. It wouldn't make sense for livery services to
have to follow that rule, because if a person has
to trail behind a drone in order to make a delivery,
why would you not just give the package to the
person the operator and then they could make the delivery themselves.

(28:14):
It's it's a waste of resources to have a person
go along with the package. Now, there were a few
demonstrations that were little more than publicity stunts rather than
an example of a working practice. So, for example, there
was a guy named Harut Vartanian who was the owner
of a dry cleaning business in Philadelphia called the Mena

(28:35):
Yunk Cleaners. Then he used a converted d j I
Phantom quad copter, which is a radio controlled device. Uh,
and he did it to deliver light loads of dry cleaning.
And by light I mean like a couple of shirts maybe.
And not only was it remote controlled, it actually required
two people to operate the drone. One person acted as pilot,

(28:57):
the other one acted as a spotter to make sure
it the drone wasn't going to run into anything or
encounter any obstacles. Now, obviously that is not a labor
saving effort, right If you're using two people to deliver
a couple of shirts using a drone, you're obviously on
the losing end of a proposition as far as work
efficiency goes. However, that really wasn't the point. The point

(29:19):
was to have a marketing approach that would attract more
young people to the business, and it's certainly gathered a
lot of of interest from various news media in the area.
There are a lot of videos about this particular move,
even though it was not a practical solution to the
problem of delivery. Other demonstrations were perhaps a little more practical,

(29:41):
though still clearly orchestrated to get a lot of news coverage.
In two thousand and fourteen, Domino's Pizza announced it was
partnering with a drone company called Flirty, a US drone company,
to arrange for drone pizza delivery services in a small
area in New Zealand. In reality, due to regulatory hurdles,
it took about two years for the company to deliver

(30:02):
its first pizza by drone, doing so in a New
Zealand town whose name I will now totally mangle. It's
Wanga Paroa. I know I butchered that name, and I
am deeply sorry. But the drones carried pizza in a
cardboard box which was holding a standard cardboard pizza box

(30:25):
inside of it, and presumably inside that was the za itself.
The drone would fly off to a customer's home hover
over their backyard and lower the cardboard box on a
toe cable until the box was safely on the ground,
at which point the cable would disengage with the box
would wind back up inside the drone, and the drone

(30:45):
would fly back home to Domino's now Wing, which I'll
talk about more in a few minutes. Also ran a
similar demonstration in Australia in two seventeen, using its drones
to deliver food from a Mexican restaurant chain, as well
as orders from a drug store company, though honestly, I
think most of the coverage was focused more on the

(31:06):
burritos than the drugs. UH. At Amazon's Machine Learning, Automation,
Robotics and Space Exploration conference also known as MARS, the
company delivered bottles of sunscreen to conference attendees, and the
company announced that the whole delivery thing was planned in advance,
but it was executed as a fully automated process. There

(31:29):
was no one piloting the actual drones, and it was
the first demonstration of Amazon's Prime Air technology on public grounds.
All previous testing, at least in the United States, have
been on private property. Now, Amazon had done other pilot
programs or I guess we should say pilot less programs
in other countries in the UK, where the company did

(31:50):
not encounter the same regulatory concerns as it did in
the United States. It went a little further, a little faster.
Amazon ran a test program of Prime Air in Cambridge
starting back in sixteen. So the company has operated in
limited fashion in other markets, just not in the US.
But the company that has reasonly managed to take the

(32:12):
next big step in drone delivery is Wing, and I'll
explain more in just a second, but first let's take
another quick break. So, as I mentioned earlier in this episode,
Wing is a company under the parent company Alphabet. That's
again the same parent company to Google, and Wing has

(32:35):
advanced the possibility of drone delivery in the US to
become the first drone company to secure air carrier certification
from the f a A, and the f a A
had made the determination that any large scale drone delivery
service in the US would have to meet the safety
and economic certification standards, the same ones that a licensed

(32:57):
airline in the United States would have to meet. And
eye license airline, I really am talking about things like
a charter airline or a small air cargo operation. Now,
without that certification, companies would not be allowed to operate
a drone delivery service at scale, and certainly not be
able to charge for the delivery service. They could charge

(33:17):
for the products, but not the delivery service itself, So
companies had a big incentive to work through this process.
Wing is the first company to actually do it. So
let's dive down a little bit into those standards to
get a better understanding of how something that applies to
manned aircraft that carry human passengers and cargo can also

(33:38):
apply to an unmanned autonomous drone. Now, in the introduction
to Air Carrier Certification, the f a A states quote,
the Federal Aviation Administration f a A uses the Air
Carrier certification process to ensure that you, the applicant, are
able to design, document, implement an audit safety critical processes

(34:02):
that do two things. Comply with regulations and safety standards
manage hazard related risks in your operating environment. The purpose
for the certification process is really to determine whether an
applicant is able to conduct business in a manner that
complies with all applicable regulations and safety standards and allows
you to manage the hazard related risks in your operating

(34:24):
systems and environment. The process is designed to preclude the
certification of applicants who are unwilling or unable to comply
with regulations or to conform to safe operating practices. So,
in other words, this whole process is there to make
sure that the people who want to operate these kind
of businesses really know their stuff and discourage those who

(34:47):
are like man, I shere would love to run an
air charter company and then realize, oh wait, I don't.
I don't have the knowledge or skill set to actually
pull this off as a real business. I'm discouraged by this.
It's better that I turn away from it now before
I spend too much time and money trying to develop
a business that ultimately I cannot actually oversee. So the

(35:12):
f a A divides this whole process up into five phases,
and I'm not going to go through all of them.
The first phase is technically a pre application phase to
issuing a certain certificate. That would be the final phase
is actually giving the certificate out. That's phase five. So
the early phases are really about the development, submission, and

(35:32):
analysis of a company's operating systems to make sure that
the business plan and the operation plan that the company
has complies with all regulations and safety standards. So essentially,
this is how a company is going to operate on paper, right,
It's their plan and it has to be a good,

(35:53):
thorough one that meets all these different regulations for safety
and risk assessment for the FAA to even go any
further in the process. So the f a A has
analysts who will take the submission of this plan on
paper and they will go through it with a fine
toothed comb to make sure everything is in order, that

(36:13):
the people behind the company have truly thought about the
risks associated with operating the business as defined, and they
have plans in place to mitigate or correct for any
any risks or safety concerns that might arise. UH. The
companies also have to submit a safety risk management process

(36:35):
that the FAA has to approve before moving on, which
then brings us all the way up through Phase three
and two Phase four. So assuming the company's plans are
in order, assuming that they get through phase three, the
phase four is all about a demonstration of the operations
of the company. So now you're no longer talking about

(36:55):
the company on paper. Now you have to be able
to prove that it works in action in the real world.
So again, the earlier phases were all about saying, this
is how we're going to do business. This is how
we're going to detect any potential problems, this is how
we're going to address those problems. It's how we're going
to ensure the safety of our customers and everybody else.

(37:19):
Phase four is actually testing that plan out with a demonstration.
So with traditional airline companies, that even includes the operation
of the aircraft to satisfy the f a a S
requirements that the said aircraft is meeting all safety regulations,
and then the company has to pass a series approving
tests set by the f a A. And if they

(37:40):
can do that, then they can show that their real
world implementation of this operations plan actually works. Now, assuming
all of the requirements are met satisfactorily, the f a
would then issue the air carrier certificate to the company.
This is phase five. Most of the safety requirements are
all about identifying those potential risks and and how the

(38:03):
business would identify, analyze, assess, and address those risks, and
how the business would assign accountability for its operations. So
one of the things you have to submit when you're
submitting for an air carrier certificate is the name of
a representative of the company who is the accountability executive.
That's the person for whom all accountability ultimately falls for

(38:28):
that business. So it needs to be someone you're really
confident in who can be incredibly certain that the operations
are going to be safe and reliable. So it's all
meant to demonstrate that people at the company have a
real understanding of how to operate in airspace and in
a responsible and safe manner. The process can take months,

(38:50):
and when news broke in March two thousand nineteen that
the f a A was going to award a drone
delivery business one of these air carrier certificate, it did
not take a whole lot of detective work to figure
out that the most likely candidate was Wing, because it
was the only drone delivery company that was listed on
the f a a's website as having applied for the

(39:13):
certification in the first place. So it was either Wing
or some company that the f a A just didn't disclose,
so pretty pretty much everyone already figured it out. Even
with this new approval, Wing will still have to operate
within some pretty tight restrictions. The FAA has yet to
establish the rules for operating drones in more densely populated

(39:34):
areas such as cities, and while commercial drones don't have
to follow all the same rules as recreational drone operators,
one of those rules still applies, which is you are
not allowed to fly a drone over other human beings.
You can't have drones flying over people because of the
potential hazard it poses, and for that reason, Wing is

(39:57):
limiting its service to some role communities in Virginia. Those
lucky Virginians will be able to order stuff to be
delivered by Wing drones, largely because there's very little likelihood
that the drones will need to fly over any crowds
of people in order to get to their destinations. So
then has limited utility. Even if it were to expand

(40:17):
to other regions, which is wings ultimate plan. They do
want to expand operations to other communities, at the moment,
they would still need to be communities that are fairly
spread out where you're not going to have drones flying
over people's heads, because there's still no rules to guide
that kind of operation. So the plan for the near
future is for Wing to continue its operations. This way,

(40:40):
it will continue to refine its approach and tweak things
that might not work so well as they could. Once
the delivery delivery drones are actively delivering packages to people
in those communities in Virginia, they can use that as
sort of testing grounds to see what the best practices
are for their business. But in the meantime, the hope
is at the f a A will continue to create

(41:03):
these rules that would allow companies like Wing to expand
operations to markets that would find those services perhaps more helpful,
like cities. Now in other parts of the world, companies
are moving forward at a slightly faster pace. Every area
is different, so companies like Wing or Amazon might face
completely different regulations or political resistance or acceptance um in

(41:26):
one country than they would in the United States, so
they often are experimenting in multiple markets simultaneously. Some are
much more receptive than others, so it is not something
that is is advancing evenly around the world. Meanwhile, in
the US, there are a lot of unanswered questions. Typically,
airspace regulations fall to the federal level, they are not

(41:49):
state level considerations, but there are some questions about what
happens if a drone has to cross state lines to
make a delivery. You might have a big city in
one state that is bordering a state line, and on
the other side of the state line, you might have
a small community, which means that deliveries are typically crossing
state lines. Uh. Is that going to cause any issues

(42:12):
with the drones? That's still a question, Like, you know,
the regulatory issues, not technical issues. There's nothing technically different
about crossing a state line. But are the regulatory problems
that might we might encounter. That's a question that hasn't
been answered yet. I find it fascinating that we're already
at a level of technical sophistication which a drone can

(42:34):
technically deliver stuff to an address by itself in the
first place. We're already there technologically, and I think that's amazing.
I've seen some implementations in which the person who's receiving
a package first has to go out and put down
kind of a mat. It's usually a square that has
a clear symbol on it, and the camera aboard a

(42:55):
drone can pick up the image. Some software processes the image,
and mide recognition software says, ah, this is indeed the
right location for me to deliver this package, and the
drone would typically descend landing more or less on that pad,
dropping its package, and then flying off. And other implementations,

(43:18):
it wasn't obvious if there was anything on the ground
that was marketing marking the point where the drone was
supposed to leave a package. So it's possible that there
are some implementations that don't require you to put out
such a pad meeting. You can just stay in your
house while you're waiting for the drone delivery, and then
when you get a notification you can go outside and
pick it up. But I'll know for sure because a

(43:39):
lot of the videos for this kind of stuff are
shot in such a way that you don't really see
the ground so well, or there are clearly sort of
a pr video where you can't be certain that it
really reflects the reality of the scenario. UH. But to
make this work a lot had to come together. The
physical operation of the drone has to account for the
weight of the pay road. Typically these companies are maxing

(44:02):
out at around five pounds for a payload, or about
two point to seven kilograms. UH. The drone has to
be able to maintain stable flight even in breezy conditions.
I do imagine that if the weather is particularly nasty,
drones are not going to be operating that day. The
obstacle recognition technology has to be top notch because the
drones are gonna be navigating areas that can have potential

(44:23):
obstacles like power lines, trees, water towers, and other buildings.
So there's still a long way to go, but some
things that have acted as barriers for the drone delivery
business are now at least resolved in the United States,
like there's there's clearly been one case where the first
steps towards widespread drone delivery are possible. Uh. The big

(44:48):
step obviously is that air carrier certification process. So Win
can actually charge money now for its drone delivery service
because it's received this certification. You know, before they could
offer a drone delivery service in a trial experiment, but
they couldn't charge for it. That would have been against
the f a's rules. Now they can charge for it. Again,

(45:11):
there's still the issue with FCC, but no one seems
to be particularly concerned with that um So you can
now include a delivery convenience fee on top of the
cost for the whatever the the item is. Now, will
we see a future in which delivery trucks disappear and
drones are delivering everything the skies are cloudy with drones,

(45:33):
Probably not. Drones are still gonna have physical limitations on
how much they can carry, and sometimes we order stuff
that's heavier than five pounds, which means they're still gonna
have to be someone driving that stuff around. And again,
types of weather might end up complicating matters, but for
certain types of products, those being small and lighter than
a few pounds, you might be able to get a

(45:55):
delivery within a half hour of ordering courtesy of a
little flying robo friend. So that brings us up to
speed to the current state of drone delivery systems. And
that concludes this episode. If you have any suggestions for
future episodes, or any comments or anything you would like
to send me, the email addresses tech Stuff at how
stuff works dot com, or you can pop on by

(46:16):
our website that's text stuff podcast dot com. You'll find
an archive of all of our old episodes there, plus
links to our social media sites and a link to
our online store, where every purchase you make goes to
help the show and we greatly appreciate it, and I'll
talk to you again really soon. Text stuff is a

(46:39):
production of my heart.