'Takeaways will be delivered by drone' in County Durham and Darlington in the future
While there is talk over Amazon selecting Darlington as a location where it will trial delivering packages by drone - attention has turned to what else drones could do in the near future.
The accountable manager of North East's leading drone company, heliguy, believes that the future could spell deliveries via drone by JustEat and UberEats.
Mark Blaney has set out a vision for the future, which could include drone flights for takeaways and police replacing helicopters with drones.
Drone (Image: PA MEDIA) 'Eventually, I believe you will have the likes of Just Eat and Uber Eats using drones instead of drivers to deliver your Chinese takeaway on a Saturday night,' said Mark, who has almost two decades of experience in the drone industry..
'And while it makes sense that Amazon would be the first major company to trial drone deliveries, I think by the end of this decade, you will see more businesses using drones to make deliveries.
Mark Blaney (Image: HELIGUY) While the question of takeaways delivered by drone has been raised, it's understood that companies such as JustEat and Uber Eats have not officially put out anything relating to drones - but have been contacted by The Northern Echo for a comment on this.
Meanwhile, for Amazon, the UK-first trial will see Amazon make Prime Air deliveries in a pre-selected 7.5 mile area, with drones guided from the firm's huge Symmetry Park warehouse.
A pizza (Image: NORTHERN ECHO) While the plans have generated a buzz, Amazon still has several hurdles to clear - including securing both planning permission and Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) approval - with the US-firm acknowledging there is 'still much work to do' before the flights become reality.
Heliguy recently received the CAA's first-ever permission to make beyond visual line of sight flights in an atypical air environment, which effectively means they can fly a drone-based anywhere in the UK - remotely from our North Shields base.
Having secured that UK-first approval from the CAA, heliguy's now in a position to use drones to carry out everything from remote security patrols to pipeline and turbine inspections, without the need for a pilot on-site - a 'gamechanger' for businesses as it makes the jobs quicker, cheaper and more thorough.
Recently, it worked with Durham County Council to inspect over 5,000 solar panels at the authority's Morrison Busty eco-depot.
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Tributes paid to much-loved former County Durham headteacher Frank Ridley
Previously, the mammoth task took days to complete - but with the help of heliguy's drones, it took just 80 minutes.
Following on from this work, Mark believes that as the public trust in drones grows, they will become more widespread.
He added: 'Within ten years, I could even see the police helicopter being replaced by 24/7 drones - or a fleet of them - and eventually you will look up and they'll be doing everything.'
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Rather than expanding new subway systems, building nuclear-energy plants or rare-earths-processing facilities, or designing the path for a new transmission line, many of the country's smartest engineers have been seduced by Wall Street and Silicon Valley, where they can have more fun and make a lot more money. I am not suggesting that the United States copy China's approach. The engineering state's spectacular successes have come at staggering costs. Beijing treats its citizens as yet another building material and Chinese society as something to be engineered too. Officials have restricted ethno-religious minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang from practicing their religion and perpetuating their cultures. Only the engineering state could have pursued the one-child policy, which was ultimately a campaign of rural terror enforced through mass sterilizations and forced abortions. China's efforts to engineer the economy—which have produced slumping real-estate values and a collapse in corporate valuations—have frightened entrepreneurs and their investors. Beijing's efforts to engineer society have made many young people feel adrift, with a substantial portion desiring to emigrate abroad. In spite of sluggish construction, lawyers are a guarantor of America's great advantage against China: pluralism, or the ability of diverse cultures to coexist and thrive under equal protection. Americans are engaged in robust debate about how to make their country better. The United States is more dynamic than Europe and can look to its own history to see the path forward. You can see the remnants of the engineering state amid the mighty industrial works scattered all over the country. Americans can draw on that legacy to stage their country's next act of transformation. I like to imagine how much better the world would be if both superpowers could adopt the pathologies of the other. China would be better if it could be more lawyerly, which means embracing substantive legal protections for individuals. America needs an engineering culture to build homes, build mass transit, and build the energy systems necessary to decarbonize. Ultimately, if America refuses to build, it will be subject to the whims of countries that do.
