With the recent laws passing for the company Wing, a drone company that has officially licensed as an airline, there could be talk again about civil papers being delivered through drones. Although this could be useful for time efficiently and have recording of showing papers being dropped off, there are also several concerns to be addressed.
Malfunction
It is possible for a drone to malfunction while out on flight. Even with intense checks before the drones take off, there is potential the GPS signals could be lost, the calibration in the drone gets interrupted, batteries could become too cold or too hot depending on the weather conditions, or something hits the drone and it goes down. All instances will result in the drone crashing towards the ground, which will ruin the aircraft and will most likely loss the papers that needed to be served.
Not Home
If a resident is not home, the drone will have to deliver the papers back to the original location and try again. Sometimes there are different residents that are at the location where the drone is attempting to serve the papers but with the drone there will not be a way to communicate with the current residents. Say the current residents know where the person being served moved to; it would make it less complicated if there was a person serving the papers to communicate with the residents. Instead the drone will head back to the original location and another phone call or two, or even a physical visit, will need to be made to find the location of the person.
Privacy
This ties in a bit with having a resident at a home that is not the correct person who the papers need to be served to. Having a drone enter the property that does not need to be there, due to a situation that would not be avoid if it was a physical server, it could cause great tension. As a person serving papers, it is easier to avoid tension because communication has been made. As a drone serving the papers, there is no communication and people have reservations on having drones with cameras around their property. Drones could cause an unavoidable unpleasant situation because of their camera and recording properties and people around them.
This is not legal yet in the United States, but with Wing becoming an airline in April of 2019 there could be changes coming/wanting changes to come in the future.
Look for more information on drone deliveries with our upcoming blog on Wing!
By Kendahl Schlueter
Sources: Wing.com and Serve-Now.com