Amazon wants air highway for delivery drones

Automated fleets to travel in own zone.

By Staff Writers on Jul 30 2015 07:10 PM

If you’ve ever wondered just how Amazon plans to run a fleet of delivery drones in the skies, the web giant finally has an answer: a 61m-high reserved piece of airspace.

The company provided rare technical insight into its highly-publicised plans for delivery drones in a regulatory paper, which effectively deals with air traffic control for unmanned aerial systems (UAS).

Already, small drones are becoming a common sight for a range of applications – from scoping the extent of large fires to photogrammetry and aerial infrastructure surveys. Even activists use them to monitor farms suspected of animal cruelty.

However, drone traffic is becoming a problem. In the US, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said late last year that it had recorded over 190 incidents of potential conflict between drones and commercial aircraft.

The answer to resolving conflicts lies in the development of drone air traffic systems.

Last week, it emerged Google, NASA, Amazon, Verizon and 11 other entities are collaborating to develop such a system.

NASA said it hopes to have an air traffic control system ready in as little as five years – although it could take 10-15 years to create a system capable of dealing with high drone densities.

Amazon sees demand for that kind of flight density within the next decade.

“In the United States, for example, there are approximately 85,000 commercial, cargo, military and general aviation flights every day,” it said in the new regulatory paper.

“This number is likely to be dwarfed by low-altitude [drone] operations in the next 10 years.”

Amazon said that “highly-automated, low-altitude commercial operations” – such as those proposed by delivery operations like Amazon’s Prime Air – would seriously challenge current airspace management models.

Its solution is to create two low-altitude zones for drones: one, stretching from ground level to 61m, would be for drones without sophisticated collision avoidance systems, while a second zone between 61m and 122m in altitude would be reserved for delivery drones.

It is assumed that delivery drones will be fitted with technology that makes them “capable of navigation, merging and sequencing, communication, maintaining safe self-separation, collision avoidance and de-confliction in congested airspace without operator assistance,” Amazon noted.

Amazon’s model also calls for a 30m no-fly zone between the upper limit of the delivery drone zone and the lower limit of integrated airspace, home to other forms of aircraft. The zone could be used by delivery drones “in emergencies”.

Drones are not only proposed as a delivery vehicle for goods bought over the internet. They have also been tested for a variety of delivery applications, including delivering food to the table of diners in busy restaurants.