Are delivery drones finally ready for take-off?

More than a decade in the making, Amazon is again set to run a trial of its delivery drone in the UK. But there are better uses for delivery drones, explains Nicole Kobie

- Nicole Kobie

lick. A customer places their order and, at a warehouse miles away, a Fire stick and bag of popcorn is boxed up and placed inside a drone. Quietly lifting off into the sky, the drone zips its way over the Cambridgeshire landscape, delivering the parcel on the customer's lawn exactly 13 minutes later.

This was the future of Amazon deliveries - back in 2016. Little progress has been made on commercial drone deliveries in the UK in the intervening years, but Amazon is now set for another go on (above?) British soil? And it's at least partially thanks to the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), which is enabling delivery drones to fly beyond the line of sight, escaping the watchful eye of grounded pilots for the first time.

To be clear, delivery drones are in UK skies already. They've been trialled for NHS deliveries to remote locations including the Isle of Mull (see issue 315, p126), while BT uses the technology for maintenance and extending coveragein difficult areas, rolling out cables by flying them over obstacles with drones (see issue 354, p126).

However, those medical supply trips are line-of-sight flights that largely repeat the same trip over and over, making deliveries from the mainland to an island outpost, for example. That's far easier to regulate than automated drones taking different routes each time. And the use cases are serious, such as ensuring medical supplies or test results can reach hospitals.

Recently, such flights have gone beyond line of sight. In Northumbria, blood samples were delivered between hospitals using Apian drones, while a similar trial with Apian and Wing is running in London between Guy's and St Thomas' hospitals to avoid blood samples getting stuck in traffic.

Such serious trials may suggest the technology - the drones and the systems for flying them - is finally catching up with the hype, and regulators are readying themselves to certify the idea.