Photo credit: Pok Rie
We wrote back in January about a drone trial by Wing, a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, in rural Australia wasn’t going quite the way Wing might have hoped. Long and short, the drones’ noise was so irritating that dog owners tried to avoid areas where they passed, people stopped using their yards, and the noise was triggering PTSD for some military veterans. Ouch!
Well, in response to the drone trial and the complaints it generated, an inquiry was formed. And Wing can’t be happy with the submissions, which conclude that:
Household delivery drones are an invasive, under-regulated technology whose potential benefits to the ACT would not outweigh the disturbance to the local community and environment.
According to one of the 39 submissions, “the service had created angst in the community, exposed a lack of regulation of the evolving technology and caused disturbances to residents and local wildlife.” Additional submissions noted the loss of wildlife and birds in the area during the trial, while others raised concerns about “an invasion of privacy,” the “commercialisation of airspace” and “limited public information on the approval and regulation of the Google-backed company’s trial.”
A couple of positive submissions were made, including one which suggested drone delivery was an “environmentally friendly option,” and another from Wing’s consultant, AlphaBeta, which asserted that “delivery drones could have wide-reaching benefits for local businesses, consumers and the environment.”
But in the end, the majority of people responding to the inquiry expressed a negative view of the trial and “strong opposition to the service’s expansion.”
One thing we rarely see addressed in these drone delivery stories is this: what compelling need does drone delivery serve? All we see are fatter coffers for the Googles and Amazons of the world at the expense of consumers addicted to impulse buying.
