Catching up with the Future?

Almost a year has passed since we launched our hydrogen fuel cell e-Drone to enable those elusive long flight endurance hours that, at least in our humble opinion, have been holding back the capabilities and progress that autonomous drones can achieve.

We've been all over the world with it, going through the use cases, ideas, problems, developments and a thousand other parameters and by chance The European Commission invited us to this comparatively small event called the "Digital Transport Days" in Helsinki, perhaps for the drone itself or perhaps because of the decarbonisation targets, or perhaps because of the word "hydrogen".

What we seriously didn't expect is to actually find out that the innovation was right in this region all along. During those 3 days we met a years' worth of talks actually presented as actions to take, innovative companies speaking the same language, new and interesting use-cases, ideas and collaboration opportunities in projects which can actually be performed in the real world. The usual conservative approach of "let's wait for someone to do it somewhere else first" was replaced with "let's be the first ones to do it" and this was seriously refreshing.

And this is not to unfairly state that Estonia and Finland are so much ahead of other countries in their open regulations to autonomous unmanned vehicles, but it seemed to also gather other companies and authorities from Europe who felt the same way.

The so called "Red Flag Acts" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts) is the best example how unreasonable fears can hold back progress, as it took 31 years in the end of the 19th century to get the speed limit from 6.4 km/h to 23 km/h. Some juicier examples of this are included in the link above, but the point is that new things always frighten. Looking back at it now we laugh at them and wonder how they could be so scared of a little more speed, but oftentimes we wonder if the same thing is not thought of us in a hundred years?

Fortunately it seems that it's a lot faster to make such changes now and in the digital age it's of course much easier to collaborate and share to avoiding repeating the mistakes - we hope to provide a part to this ourselves and we're also happy that this event brought together others who will add their expertise to it as well.

All that's left to add is to once again thank all the innovative people we've met, all the establishments that are looking at what's possible rather than what we've been used to and all the regulatory bodies especially in the aviation authorities who came up and essentially said "Let's raise that speed limit together!"

Final credits go to everyone on this picture with us and the countless ones who didn't happen to be around when we took it, but certainly share the same boat in one way or another. ByDrone/Third Space Auto, Fleetonomy and VTT.