Should Drones Have Their Own Private Airspace?

Amazon Proposes Drones-Only Airspace to Facilitate High-Speed Delivery (+Video)

The retail giant’s proposal carves out airspace from 200ft-400ft exclusively for autonomous drones, with a further 100ft above it declared a no-fly zone

Ed Pilkington | July 28, 2015

Amazon is proposing that a pristine slice of airspace above the world’s cities and suburbs should be set aside for the deployment of high-speed aerial drones capable of flying robotically with virtually no human interference.

Source: http://www.amazon.com/b?node=8037720011 We're excited about Prime Air — a future delivery system from Amazon designed to safely get packages into customers' hands in 30 minutes or less using small unmanned aerial vehicles. Putting Prime Air into service will take some time, but we will deploy when we have the regulatory support needed to realize our vision. View our July 9, 2014 letter to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, here.

The retail giant has taken the next step in its ambition to deliver packages via drone within 30 minutes by setting out in greater detail than ever before its vision for the future of robotic flight. It envisages that within the next 10 years hundreds of thousands of small drones – not all of them Amazon’s or devoted to delivery – will be tearing across the skies every day largely under their own automated control.

<more at http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/28/amazon-autonomous-drones-only-airspace-package-delivery; related links: http://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-dreams-of-drones-only-airspace/ (Amazon dreams of drones-only airspace; How do you combat drone safety worries? Dedicate airspace purely for commercial drones to operate. July 29, 2015) and http://www.wired.com/2015/08/really-want-amazons-drones-swarm-skies/ (Do we really want Amazon's drones to swarm our skies? August 4, 2015)>