Amazon scored one of the greatest tech PR coups in recent history when it got CBS to put its quadcopter-powered delivery service on air the day before Cyber Monday. Sadly, CBS pretty much ignored that this was a pretty unrealistic proposal for the time being, not in the least because commercial drone flights will remain illegal in the U.S. for the next few years.
If journalists aren’t even allowed to use a standard quadcopter to take images of people on a beach, having autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) deliver the latest Stephen King tome to your door is obviously still a while out, too.
With the hype around Amazon’s drone dying down, let’s take a look at what’s holding commercial drones back and what we can expect once they take flight.
The technology for drones is here, no doubt, but government regulation isn’t and there are good reasons why the FAA is taking things slow.
By 2015, the FAA is supposed to create rules for integrating unmanned planes, quadcopters and other flying contraptions into the regular airspace. That’s quite a challenge. For a human to start flying around in a small Cessna, it takes an average of 60 hours of instructions and a written and practical exam before they are allowed to start puttering around in U.S. airspace. And that’s just for the most basic of pilots’ licenses.
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