Are You Ready to Pilot Your Own Drone?

Back in 1985, movie fans watched in amazement when Dr. Emmett Brown returned from the future to advise Marty McFly “Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads” in the movie Back to the Future. Fast-forward to 2016 and a passenger-carrying drone has just been unveiled to the delight of tech fans eager to catch a glimpse of our looming future.

Chinese drone maker Ehang Inc has announced the world’s first drone that is capable of carrying a human passenger at the CES show in Las Vegas. A 2-hour charge will give you 23 minutes of ride time as long as you are under 220 pounds, so a quick step on the scales would be strongly advised before handing over your safety to four double-propellers spinning parallel to the ground like non-passenger flying drones.

Those of you feeling incredibly brave will be able to fly EHang 184 between 1,000 to 1,650 feet off the ground or a maximum altitude of 11,500 feet and a top speed of 63 miles per hour. Routes are plotted before taking off, and you will not find any controls inside this 21st-century vessel other than the two buttons for take off and landing.

Although, it's 18 feet long, like any good gadget, it folds away for easy storage to a more manageable five-foot space and weighs about 440 pounds. The cost is expected to be around $200,000 to $300,000 that also includes the all-important free onboard Wi-Fi as you take to the skies.

Notwithstanding any health and safety concerns you might have around flying high in the sky with only two buttons and a Microsoft Surface, EHang quickly pointed out that the drone has multiple power backups and software that will land automatically if it runs into any problems. Hopefully the auto-landing site won't be the lion enclosure at your local zoo!

Wannabe 21st century amateur pilots are also assured that the experience will be safer than driving a car considering that most car accidents are primarily caused by the human drivers themselves and that by removing any controls that a drone pilot is responsible for, other than take off and landing, the manufacturers have removed the primary source of potential accidents. 

I am sure that this prototype of the first autonomous drone that can carry a human will quickly run into regulatory issues. Chief Financial Officer Shang Hsiao was the first to admit that it occupies a legal "grey area” and that they are still very much in the early stages of working with different regulatory agencies to ensure that EHang 184 is commercially available later this year. However, current regulations that require years of testing would suggest that this would likely not be as straightforward as they believe. 

Co-founder George Yan interestingly encouraged critics or naysayers to look back at our past

If you roll the timeline back to 100 years you will see that when we went from horse and carriage to vehicles people had the same concerns of whether you could trust it to take you from A to B

Autonomous transportation where you click on a smartphone app to indicate where you want to go and are then automatically taken to your destination without any further thought or action on your part shows just how technology continues to fuel our desire for instant gratification. It appears that even spending hours learning and mastering skills such as driving a car or flying a plane could soon be confined to the history books if these latest trends continue to evolve. 

It’s always important to give yourself a reality check when you see anything at CES as very often much of what you see are prototypes from companies seeking funding or gauging early consumer interest, and many of the products fail to get off the ground altogether and are never ever seen again. The show however is also a visor into future customer trends and seeing some of these cool gadgets at least shows what the tech community is thinking of as the future of human kind.

The sheer presence of the auto industry at this year’s CES showcases how a world of autonomous cars both on and off the ground is inevitable at some point in the not too distant future. If autonomous transportation, air or road, can reduce the number of accidents and fatalities otherwise caused by human drivers, maybe this new drone technology should be labeled as progress rather than looked at with skepticism?

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