Standard brick weights about 2 kg (4 pounds). Plus the drone itself probably another 2 lbs. Imagine getting bonked by a malfunctioning 6 lbs. drone at 200 mph.
This device though doesn't have the density of a brick, and it is aerodynamic: failure modes wouldn't be an uncontrolled freefall, it would be a stable glide.
You could fail-safe this by adding parachute pyrotechnics which require an active command signal to not deploy: that way the worst case total electrical failure of a drone would immediately deploy chutes to slow it down.
This seems like a much more acceptable control then the failure mode of a car: which weighs 2 tons and contrary to popular belief only stays on roads by convention.
That's already more or less a solved problem with consumer drones: outside a catastrophic mechanical failure like a wing shattering or the motherboars spontaneously dying, the failure state is that the drone either returns to its starting location using GPS, or hovers and waits for manual control until its battery is almost out and then slowly descends while beeping loudly.
The current version of the drones used here and mentioned by the FAA is a fixed wing design though, it’s only the second version that has the ability to hover. A loss of power at low altitude is going to mean it crashes into something. Reading through the links in the article there’s a lot of mention of their Detect & Avoidance system so presumably it can somewhat safely steer through the airspace.
I assume given the 5m radius for drops they’re going to be operating in places that mostly have low density though. I’d also assume that they’d plan flight paths to be as safe as possible.
> That's already more or less a solved problem with consumer drones
The words of a man who's never experienced rapid, unexpected, uncontrollable "drone flyaway". And yes, I have a modern, very capable drone and I'm not a complete idiot. Sometimes they just go... crazy.
