Drone delivering “first asparagus of the season” to Dutch restaurant crashes and burns
Michelin-starred restaurant De Zwaan wanted to mark the start of the asparagus season earlier this month by getting a consignment of vegetables delivered from farm to kitchen by drone, but the publicity stunt backfired when the UAV crashed and burned on a country road. Ronald Peijenburg had previously used a variety of novel methods to get the first asparagus of the season to his restaurant in the Dutch town of Etten-Leur, from a Formula 1 car to a hot air balloon, and felt that using a drone would capture the 2015 zeitgeist.
The drone, carrying a metal canister of the precious asparagus stalks, took off without a hitch from the farm and the “pilot” and a TV crew tracked its progress in a following van.
Midway through the journey, the drone had to have a stopover on a quiet lane for a battery change. The landing was a success, but the drone and its cargo crashed and went up in flames on the take-off.
Fortunately, Peijenburg had arranged for the main consignment of asparagus to be delivered by more conventional means. So the vegetable was still on the menu at De Zwann – but the service was a little slower than promised.
This is not the first time that restaurateurs looking to use drones to deliver some publicity have been left with egg on their faces. In December, a TGI Friday restaurant in New York had mistletoe-bearing drones hovering above the heads of diners, hoping to capture their kisses on camera. But on their maiden flight one of the drones became entangled in the hair of photographer Georgine Benvenuto, slicing off the tip of her nose and splitting her lip.
Incidents like this, however isolated and unrepresentative they may be, can wobble the general public’s confidence in drones; and this could be a concern for the postal and express delivery businesses which have high hopes for the technology.
Amazon, which was given approval by The Federal Aviation Administration (FFA) earlier this month to test a delivery drone in a live environment, wants to use drones to deliver packages to its customers over distances of 10 miles or more. This would require drones to travel equipped with technology to avoid hitting other aircraft.
In China, S.F. Express is already operating flights on a daily basis around the Pearl River Delta, the heartland of China’s manufacturing industry. Meanwhile, the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association of China (AOPA) is leading an initiative to finalize regulations on flying commercial drones in China. As of the end of 2014, China had 244 drone pilots with AOPA licences.
The public’s concerns over drone safety- whether justified or not – has prompted some to suggest that we should explore the possibility of distributing post and parcels under our feet rather than above our heads. As reported by PostandParcel yesterday, the town of Northampton, in the UK Midlands, is currently the testing site for a project which is looking at the feasibility of building an underground freight pipeline delivery network.
