Amazon, Google, Others Are Developing Private Air-Traffic Control for Drones
wsj.com
wsj.com
As the skies get crowded, craft could even "rent" their airspace by the cubic meter. If you're a craft which can guarantee to be in a smaller space and fly close to other craft, like formation flying, you use up less airspace and save money.
Something like this for big planes would save massive amounts of fuel, because algorithms could be used to match flight patterns with weather maps to get a tailwind or uplift, rather than having a pilot having to manually ask ATC over the radio and then being forced to fly in a straight line at a fixed altitude as most planes do today.
Additionally, people might start to "squat" the airspace around airports and along preferrable routes and "rent" them to airlines at an increased price. (Or, if they are a competitor or have other reasons to damage the airline, simply block it and don't rent it at all)
The "tiny blocked airspaces everywhere" problem is really how do you design an efficient market.
Perhaps for example, just because you have a piece of airspace doesn't give you the right to keep it. Someone else can come along and outbid you for it auction-style. That way, anyone squatting will have to pay handsomely to do so.
Obviously all the routing and bidding and allocation is done automatically and the pilot is just given a route to fly. While there is no shortage of airspace, most bids would probably be fractions of a cent anyway.
There's someone who registered a new TLD that was aimed at making wedding websites, and they make it so the cost increases over time to avoid squatting. I think their rates are something like <$50 for 1 year, then >$1000 for the next, but the ramp could be however steep you want and on whatever time scale.
Maybe I misunderstand your model, but which entity would run the auction? And who gets to collect the winning bids?
In the previous post, I assumed the whole market was to be a thing between the airspace participants while the air traffic authority just keep track who has blocked which part of the airspace. Would the authority now also conduct the auctions?
> That way, anyone squatting will have to pay handsomely to do so.
I'm not an economist, but I don't see why the squatters couldn't have deep pockets.
Squatting for political/strategic reasons might be done by airlines themselves - who might have large enough war chests to play games. (If the goal is to keep certain competitors out, they might not even need to win the auctions - driving up the price enough so that continued bidding becomes unviable would be enough)
If squatting for profit is viable, there might appear speculators who use credit/investor money to stay in the aucton.
> While there is no shortage of airspace, most bids would probably be fractions of a cent anyway.
My suspicion is that, just like land on the ground, different areas of airspace would have vastly different value. For drone/airtaxi/etc participants, airspace above big cities would probably be very valuable - while long-distance flights need to choose the best route, while taking distance across the globe, jetstreams, weather, distance to nearest airports, etc into account.
Have occupancy be based on physical occupancy with a time limit based on a reasonable value corresponding to expected airspeed for the location. Of course airports would still control the landing/takeoff order because that's what they do.
I suspect the FAA has rules against blimps and helicopters hanging out in the paths the jumbojets take so I don't really see any way it would be possible to squat in a particular piece of sky.
For smaller drones, I really doubt there will ever be more drones flying around than birds and they seem quite able to share the airspace with a minimum of problems aside from becoming lunch for malicious actors or colliding with ground based vehicles.
For example, one can rent an indoor soccer field at a fixed weekly time for a fixed annual amount, and nobody else gets to use that field during that time. Then once a year that contract can be re-negotiated if someone else is offering a better deal -- better field? higher or lower price? nicer changing room? shorter- or longer-term agreement? etc.
The innovation the parent was suggesting was that airspace is allocated/traded in realtime without any long-term arrangements in effect. (If I understood it correctly)
Flight planners already do this manually for airlines, when creating flight plans
I'm actually running an effort at Airbus' A^3 division to study this exact question - how to architect new air traffic systems to (safely!) enable extremely high density operations of drones, UAVs, autonomous air taxis, etc. And we're hiring.
Project info: https://www.airport-technology.com/features/airbuss-foray-ai...
Job listings: https://www.airbus-sv.com/jobs/ , under Altiscope
using web for this seems a bit heavyweight
Also, web services are well understood in terms of scalability, uptime even in the face of replacing/failing hardware, ability to shift load to other datacenters, etc.
By building on HTTP, you get authentication (OAuth) and encryption (HTTPS) for free. Build a JSON webservice and you get a nice extensible protocol too, so can add new features on an almost weekly basis without disrupting existing users. By building on TCP/IP, you can allow any form of transport - satellite, wifi, bluetooth, LTE, etc. without any extra testing or certification.
Most existing airtraffic control systems wouldn't be able to handle a nuke... The internet is designed to resiliently route around such things...
It's like taking a bus to a race. Are they going to provide their own hardware? If yes go and improve the existing indicator system and then sell it back to FAA/airports. If not, I am going to get popcorn and watch as they kill our cell phone coverage.
I am not sure cell towers can take the extra load. I know I am rushing, but wait till instead of Fedex running around you see 1 drone per package, zipping through cells.
P.S. I think all these companies only care to get the FAA to sign off and allow package delivery (or spying, I mean "data collection" -- who knows). I feel they will come up with a clunky system that people are going to hate for years.
P.S.2: Didn't say anything about security or fairness considerations. I can easily see Amazon blocking a wide path for their drones and be like, we paid for it we get to use it bugger off.
What's more, connectivity around drones gets better - e.g. I recall even special "for drones" mobile plan by Verizon: https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/6/13193616/verizon-selling-... .
Not here to be the voice of dissent for its own sake, merely an aviation enthusiast.