Pizza delivery by drone 'trialled' in New Zealand Multinational pizza megacorp Domino's claims it is trialling pizza delivery drones in New Zealand. In partnership with quadcopter delivery business Flirtey, Domino's demonstrated the service in Auckland today, in complete compliance with New Zealand's civil aviation regulation. The publicity stunt managed to attract the …
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How many customers are going to live somewhere in range where its safe to land a drone and how often are weather conditions suitable to fly it? A pizza in a box could easily catch a gust of wind and crash a drone. And of course there are hazards like wires, pylons, trees, rain, fog, buildings, night etc.
And I bet animals like seagulls would soon get the knack of attacking drones if there was a delicious pizza hanging underneath it. And people griefing the drone / vandalizing it because it's human nature to do it.
Until someone figures out how to solve these issues I don't see this anything more than a lame PR exercise.
How do you maintain line of sight to the drone if you are landing in (say) someone's garden behind a fence?
Line of sight (if not by use of FPV displays) would be handy if the pizza shop (or delivery vehicle) is just on the other side of a narrow river, without a nearby bridge but otherwise this seems like a gimmick.
You need to be fairly close by when landing/taking off these things to avoid obstacles - particularly non-static ones....
At least the regulations don't require someone to run (or fly) in front of the drone with a red flag.
"the drones need to be kept within line-of-sight at all times"
So the operator / operatress(?) walks along with the drone, which means that instead of the pizza (not that the stuff D's sell is related to that) being delivered by a motorscooter it will arrive at walking speed.
Alternative plans: https://what-if.xkcd.com/149/
Alternative alternative plan, satellite delivered pizza!
(Please step outside before ordering)
I accidentally mixed up this "pizza delivery by drones" article with the "eagles against drones" one, which inevitably leads to this calculation for "pizza delivery by eagles", http://what-if.xkcd.com/149/ .
Somewhat unrelatedly, our local curryhouse has been unsuccessfully trialling "delivery by crone" instead, meaning cold food and random substitutions plus bewildering conversations.
"Latest Company Resorts to Drone Story to Advertise Products"
Which is exactly what this is. Most of Auckland is a no-fly zone for drones anyway, and Simon Bridges is the worst kind of clueless party hack who will attend the opening of an envelope if he thinks it will get him on the TV news. (Which this story did).
the street kids and bogans (read: chavs down under) will knock them out of the sky for fun and / or sell them round the back of the pub. it will become prohibitively expensive experiment that will make people realise: humans have not yet collectively grown up enough to deal with this sort of technology yet.
Bugger that for a game of soldiers- having to walk 30m to get a pizza when everyone else delivers it to your door.
I mean, the only reason one gets delivery pizza is because of laziness*, amiright? It's not for the taste, price or nutritional content that's for sure.
* OK, alright I'll allow drunkenness as well
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