2 minute read
Drones delivering during pandemic
By Adam S. Kamras
While the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a continual parade of ground delivery vehicles in every neighborhood, drones operated by trained, licensed remote pilots are also flying into some communities with packages of food, medications and other items.
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Owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, Wing became the first delivery drone to receive Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approval to conduct test flights in the U.S. in April 2019. Wing began delivering household goods and meals to a limited area of Christiansburg, Virginia, six months later and has experienced a jump in demand during the pandemic, especially for medicine, toilet paper and groceries.
Other COVID-19-inspired uses of drones have included sanitizing city streets, delivering personal protective equipment to hospitals and transporting coronavirus test samples from health facilities to laboratories.
New York Times writer Alex Williams outlined some of the various uses of drones during the crisis in a May article, “The Drones Were Ready for This Moment.”
“Coronavirus has been devastating to humans, but may well prove a decisive step toward a long-prophesized Drone Age, when aerial robots begin to shed their Orwellian image as tools of war and surveillance and become a common feature of daily life, serving as helpers and, perhaps soon, companions,” wrote Williams.
Award-winning program
The University of Delaware’s Division of Professional and Continuing Studies (UD PCS) has been educating students for this moment since March 2018, when it launched its awardwinning Ground School and FAA Part 107 Test Prep program. The program provides comprehensive training and prepares drone pilots for the Federal Aviation Administration’s airman knowledge test, which must be passed to earn the FAA Part 107 remote pilot certificate that is required to legally fly a drone for commercial use. For commercial drone delivery, carrying the property of another for compensation beyond the visual line of sight requires Part 135 certification, which is the highest level of drone pilot certification.
In-demand training
The FAA projects an increase in commercial drones operating in U.S. airspace from roughly 110,000 in 2018 to 450,000 in 2022. Over the same period, the agency expects the number of commercial drone pilots to climb from about 70,000 to 300,000.
Miriam McNabb, editor of Dronelife, an industry news site; and CEO of Job for Drones, an online drone services marketplace; told the New York Times, “This is the moment when the drone industry gets to show what it can do. Things like drone delivery are lifesaving applications that are changing people’s perceptions of drones.”
