Oops! Drone delivery smash knocks out control for thousands

Oops! Drone delivery smash knocks out control for thousands

Google sister company Wing has been creation steady progress with tests involving its delivery drone in Australia, but a recent accident highpoint some of the challenges facing such pilot projects as they attempt to go mainstream.
The mishap happened when a Wing drone on its way to transport a food order to a customer in Logan City, Brisbane, crashed into an 11,000-volt power line. The collision caused a small fire as the drone fried on the wire earlier falling to the ground, leading to the disruption of current supplies to around 2,300 homes and businesses.
The smash itself didn’t knock out the supply, but operative Energex decided to switch it off so it could carefully examine the extent of the damage caused by the accident, ABC reported. The outage lasted 45 minutes for most of those precious, though 300 clients located near to the accident site had to wait three hours for the facility to be restored.
A spokesperson for Wing told the news outlet that the drone had been trying to make a “precautionary controlled landing [but] came to rest on an overhead power line.”
The spokesperson added: “We immediately reported this to Energex, who joined the location. Two hours later, during the retrieval procedure, there was a power outage in the area.”
The Alphabet-owned company say sorry for any inconvenience caused and said it was conducting a review to find out how a drone on its way to make a delivery ended up destroying itself on a power line.
Last year, Wing said Logan City had “a solid claim to be the drone-delivery capital of the world” for the great number of transports — around 4,000 a week — that its drones were making in the area.
Wing’s delivery drone pilot developments partner with local businesses and let select clients use their smartphones to order items such as snacks and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. A drone then flies to the customer’s address and lowers the order miserable on a tether into their yard. With fewer releases and faster delivery times over road-based deliveries, Wing believes drones are the way onward when it comes to getting smaller items into the hands of clients.
But obviously, there are still a few creases that need ironing out earlier such facilities are ready for prime time.
This new calamity, for example, will come as an embarrassment to Wing, which needs to get communities legal if it’s ever to be allowed to operate its delivery drones in urban areas on a more extensive basis. In recent years, some residents in Australian neighborhoods where Wing has been challenging its drones have been unfortunate about the noise created by the machineries. In response, Wing engineers created a new version of its drone that flies more silently. Now it just needs to make one that avoids control lines, too.