Drone over a snowfield. Photo via Chase Jarvis
Drone over a snowfield. Photo via Chase Jarvis

I started flying in small planes in high school. I can vividly remember my first flight in a little Cessna. Took off from Paine Field in Everett, and headed east over the Snohomish Valley.

I was so excited, but then I began to realize I was disoriented. I knew the area intimately, but suddenly I couldn’t figure out where I was.

Neighborhoods I had spent years in suddenly became unrecognizable, hills were almost imperceptible. Flying high above it all redefined my world instantly. Roads became reference points, not pathways and constraints.

I loved it.

This ignited a lifelong passion and dream, a world not defined and limited by roads. Roads are a more than 6,000 year old technology. I wanted to bring the true freedom and power of flight to everyone. I believe drones are a way to begin to do this.

amazon-p1Drones are big news.

In tech circles like Seattle and Silicon Valley, they are being talked about as the new “it” investment. Amazon has 23 job listings for Prime Air right now. Headlines were made around the country earlier this year when someone maneuvered a hobby-store remote control multicopter (news outlets referred to it as a drone) around the Space Needle.

A few years ago, Seattle angel investor Andy Liu asked me about potential innovations using drones. He thought they could be used to deliver food, medicine, and other items — fast. I told him it was a bad idea. They had too small of payload carrying ability to be truly useful, I reasoned.

Then, last year Jeff Bezos went on 60 Minutes and said Amazon.com was going to start using drones en masse. Andy came to the conclusion that he might have overvalued my opinion.

I’ve since reconsidered my position.

The word drone is packed with emotion now. The word sensationalizes headlines, and it has become evocative. The military applications of drones have peppered drone parlance with names like “Predator,” “Reaper,” “Taranis,” “Gorgon Stare,” and other unfriendly sounding terms.

To facilitate this conversation, I’m going to focus on commercial use multicopters and ignore weaponized military drones.

Last year the Seattle Police Department returned a pair of small multicopters due to “public outcry.” Of all the things police departments are acquiring lately, a glorified toy that I’ll buy my daughter — ok, it’s really for me — doesn’t spark any outrage or concern for me.

Photo via Shutterstock
Photo via Shutterstock

These complaints about multicopters are really about the proliferation of cameras, reducing perceived privacy. This was the similar complaint made by the advent of camera phones and Google Glass. Multicopters just give cameras access to the skies, and this upsets some people.

Photographer and entrepreneur Chase Jarvis has been using multicopters for years around the world, pointing out the freedom they provide in capturing rare images.

“Artistically, they are phenomenal,” he says. “Pictures and views you couldn’t get any other way. It’s made a lot of shots possible to show the world in new and creative ways.”

Chase is using multicopters to get shots, not just glorified selfies, but epic still and video shots he couldn’t get with his cameras Earth bound.

These amazing images and unique perspectives have opened our eyes, which simultaneously excites and frightens people. (Check out the great video here that documents how Chase uses remote control aircraft).

Photographer Chase Jarvis with a drone at Gas Works Park in Seattle.
Photographer Chase Jarvis with a drone at Gas Works Park in Seattle.

Despite the outcry over cameras, I believe that safety is a more immediate concern.

Some of the work I’ve done was hamstrung by the human/multicopter interaction. It is problematic and fraught with risk for both parties. If you image search “injuries from multicopters” you’ll probably not be ordering blood sausage at lunch.

There are legitimate safety concerns, but on the whole they are relatively minor. In a really bad scenario, a small multicopter can injure a person, but they have far less capacity for damage than a car. Making sure that drones are safe and reliable is essential to their implementation, but entrepreneurs are rapidly coming up with clever solutions.

Cirrus BRSThe Cirrus SR22 is a neat plane — actress Angelina Jolie has one — that has a parachute for the whole aircraft. In the event of an emergency, the pilot can deploy a parachute that the entire plane. To date, this system has reportedly saved 95 lives.

A similar system is being incorporated into some multicopters. In the event of a failure, collision, or problem — the system stops the blades and deploys the chute. A small multicopter floating down on a parachute would significantly reduce the risk of injuries or damage from a broken multicopter falling out of the sky.

Multicopters can bring the power of flight to package deliveries. They aren’t feasible in the near term to do Costco size shopping runs, but if the package weighs 20 pounds or less and fits into an 18” box — that can be done with existing technology.

I can now see a near future with multicopters quietly flying over Seattle, delivering packages, and taking thousands of cars off our clogged roads. It could take a multicopter just 10 minutes to fly the six miles between Seattle and Bellevue.

Electric multicopters are more than 100 times more efficient than road-based vehicles. So, every time a multicopter replaces a multi-ton fossil fuel burning vehicle for a delivery, we’re reducing traffic, pollution, and fuel consumption. An electric package delivery multicopter would cost less than 1 cent per mile to fly.

Retail will be radically transformed by multicopters. If the Northgate Nordstrom doesn’t have my size, but Southcenter does, they can now send it to me and it will beat me home.

Drone. Photo via Chase Jarvis
Drone. Photo via Chase Jarvis

Or take it one step further. Nordstrom only has to carry one size of every shoe for you to try on (with socks please!) and then a fresh new (and never tried on) pair will arrive at your home, or car, or office in minutes from a central warehouse in a lower rent district.

The power of instant airborne delivery brought to everyone will alter the balance of power. Products, service, and quality will matter more than logistics, location, and inventory. Where we eat lunch is almost always a location constrained decision. Multicopters will reward quality and devalue location.

I could summon a multicopter to my house Uber-easy, and send some cookies I baked to my wife at work. Forgetting your medicine at home is no longer cause for panic. A car out of gas can have a gallon delivered in minutes instead of having to walk or call an expensive tow truck. Climb Mt. Si and have a quart of ice cream delivered at the summit.

Google's Project Wing
Google’s Project Wing

The transformation that a multicopter-serviced society brings is bright. It will improve the quality of life, benefit our environment, provide more variety, and even give small “mom and pop” companies a broader market and chance to compete with the dominators. It will usher in a new era as transformative as the introduction of the airplane itself.

I quote the great entrepreneur Doc Brown from Back to the Future: “where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”

Russell Belden is a Seattle entrepreneur. He has designed and built drones for business and defense industries, as well as consulted on dozens of drone designs. He co-wrote Robots in the Age of Pirates, published in the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine in December 2011.

Editor’s note: National Geographic contributing photographer Chad Copeland and former Wired editor Chris Anderson — now the CEO of drone maker 3D Robotics — will be featured speakers at the GeekWire Summit on Oct. 2. Tickets and details here

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