Optus outage threatens drone delivery rollout, highlights need for reliable telecommunications

The telco’s massive outage has underscored a key risk that threatens to hinder the widespread launch of drone deliveries in Australia.

Elsight chief executive Yoav Amitai says drone need access to constant and reliable telecommunications to ensure safety.

Optus’s massive national outage has cast the spotlight on the safety of drone deliveries, potentially further hindering the widespread launch of the autonomous aircraft flying parcels directly to people’s homes.

That’s according to Israeli-headquartered and ASX-listed drone communications Elsight, which says constant and reliable access to telecommunications is vital to ensuring flights are safe.

This is particularly the case for last and middle mile logistics companies that are looking at operating drones beyond line of sight to achieve scale and make deliveries on autonomous flights profitable.

Amazon says its drones are on track to deliver 500 million parcels a year by 2030, expanding its deliveries beyond US cities to the UK and Italy next year.

This compares with drones delivering 875,000 packages last year globally and 507,000 in 2021. That number is expected to rise to 1.04 million by the end of next month, according to McKinsey & Company — but is still a long way off Amazon’s target.

This means the world and Australia is about to experience a surge of buzzing aircraft overhead as drone deliveries grow exponentially. But Elsight chief executive Yoav Amitai said regulators needed to have “complete confidence” in the safety of the flights.

“The Optus outage … was a prime example of the importance for safety and security in the drone delivery space,” Mr Amitai said.

“This is important for drone operation over built-up areas like drone delivery services. The operators need complete confidence in their connection to be able to operate over urban areas.”

Amazon's latest MK30 drone during testing.

Elsight has developed a Halo system, which uses a mix of all available signals available: radio frequency and satellite. The tech was embargoed, and refined for military application for five years before being released for other applications including drone delivery.

Mr Amitai said the technology had allowed one of Elsight’s biggest clients Airobotics to secure “blanket approval” from the US Federal Aviation Administration to operate in US cities without the need to apply for permits on a “case-by-case basis”.

He expects other jurisdictions will follow, demanding similar capabilities but said regulators were seeing more professionalism — including taking safety seriously — in the industry, and this was driving regulatory progress.

“I think that’s why people in the industry are so optimistic because regulators see those changes.

“I always give a reference to the beginning of the automotive industry, given the reference of the red flags rule. That set a rule that an internal combustion engine vehicle needed to have a person walking in front of them waving a red flag so people knew that there was a vehicle coming.

“That took something like 20 years to get off this rule, then people were able to start and getting the benefits from those machines. We’re pretty much in the same era right.”

An Elsight/P3 Tech survey found the biggest impediment to the industry’s expansion were regulators. Almost 75 per cent of respondents cited regulatory issues as a barrier to the widespread adoption of advanced operations such as beyond the visual line of sight operations and flights over people.

This is despite David Carbon – the Australian-born executive in charge of Amazon’s drone program and who previously headed Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner operations – saying the eCommerce giant had achieved a level of safety that was “magnitudes higher than driving to the store”.

“That’s not just us plucking a 10-12 point word out of Scrabble right? It is actually mathematically hundreds of times safer,” Mr Carbon said.

David Carbon, the Australian executive who heads Amazon's drone program, says the company’s latest MK30 drone is ‘hundreds of time safer’ than driving to the store.

But Mr Amitai said Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) had been a more progressive regulator. It granted DoorDash and Alphabet-owned Wing approval for a pilot program for drone deliveries in southeast Queensland operations late last year. In April that program was expanded to Ipswich within a 7km radius of the Springfield Central Shopping Centre.

CASA also allowed Swoop Aero in 2021 to complete regional drone deliveries of pharmaceuticals in the Goondiwindi region on the Queensland-NSW border.

But Mr Amitai said Australia faces a big hurdle in the rapid adoption of drones,

“From a company standpoint, they are looking for population density that makes sure that they can deploy those systems. Sydney, Melbourne and Perth and the Gold Coast and other places obviously make sense but the rest of Australia it will be very hard to show economical proof of that because of the density of the population.

“That’s why companies are starting in other places. Like in the US, for example, every city has a required population and there is basically an unlimited number of cities like that. It’s not about CASA, they’re doing a reasonable job compared with other regulators.”

Originally published as Optus outage threatens drone delivery rollout, highlights need for reliable telecommunications