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Canadian company gets FAA approval to have its drones fly over you in Boston

By adamg on Tue, 01/28/2025 - 3:10pm

HorizonMass reports on a company gloating about its FAA approval without really specifying just why it wants to have drones zipping and hovering right over your head, although a month or so ago, it announced it had successfully finished using drones to deliver medications in a pilot with Mass. General, but in a city and state with few guardrails on what surveillance-eager authorities could also use them for.

Neighborhoods: 
Boston
Topics: 
Technology


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Comments

By Former Westroxer on Tue, 01/28/2025 - 4:40pm.

Drones don't have pilots. Duh.

By adamg on Tue, 01/28/2025 - 8:23pm.

And sometimes words have more than one meaning.

By mg on Tue, 01/28/2025 - 8:37pm.

I assume you mean a pilot study, correct?

By adamg on Tue, 01/28/2025 - 9:02pm.

Sometimes shortened down to just "pilot" by the more wonkaphilic among us!

By mg on Wed, 01/29/2025 - 10:24am.

Yes, at work we just say "pilot" much of the time.

By _Sean on Tue, 01/28/2025 - 4:58pm.

The FAA is important...but how did this not require local approval? Ignoring the (huge) privacy risks in allowing drones to follow people & vehicles around Boston for a moment, what happens when someone gets hurt or killed by one of these drones?

Also, how is this not the equivalent of DOT decreeing that all semi trucks can now go 50mph anywhere in Boston (ignoring all speed limits)?

By what what now? on Tue, 01/28/2025 - 5:00pm.

into a big butterfly net, can I keep it?

By Ron Newman on Tue, 01/28/2025 - 6:05pm.

How do you allow unrestricted drone flights and not interfere with planes landing and taking off at Logan?

By Greene on Tue, 01/28/2025 - 8:55pm.

Their approval isn't "do whatever you want with a drone lol."

They worked with a federal agency to get specific clearance for what they want to do.

Where did you even get "unrestricted?" Nobody said that.

By anon on Tue, 01/28/2025 - 9:41pm.

which they have. so no

By Brent Jeffries on Tue, 01/28/2025 - 6:30pm.

No. Just no.

By John Costello on Tue, 01/28/2025 - 8:04pm.

This a 100 times.

By adamg on Tue, 01/28/2025 - 8:56pm.

I'm hoping we're a couple of days away from a new site, with no more performance issues and upthumbing and even, are you sitting down, emojis.

The new UHub

Yeah, it looks kind of similar to what there is now, but it actually works now (couldn't say that a couple weeks ago), and I'm down to porting over zillions of bits of sort of meta-content. 20, count 'em, 20 years of articles and comments all moved over with no problems and wicked fast, but stuff like addresses and latitude/longitudes for maps? Nightmare fuel.

I've finally gotten all the lat/lon data into the new site, but as you can see, I still need to fine tune some of the maps built from it - not sure how a map showing every single fire I've written about over, oh, 15 years is particularly useful or interesting (I've already pruned down neighborhood crime maps):

The new UHub

By AdamB on Tue, 01/28/2025 - 9:37pm.

Looking forward to the new site. Curious if it's still on Drupal? You should write a case study on your migration if so!

By adamg on Tue, 01/28/2025 - 11:44pm.

Went with Backdrop instead. Warning: Drupalspeak coming up.

I started out playing with Drupal 10, even built a test site in it, and realized that while, yeah, there's some very cool stuff there, it was way too complex and cumbersome for my needs - I'm just one person, with basically a hobbyist level of tech skills, and I don't really care about configuration management and didn't want to learn twig or deal with what seemed to be like increased server needs.

So I started looking at Backdrop instead. It's basically a more modern Drupal 7 and so, at least for me, not too steep a learning curve. Yes, its developer community is tiny compared to Drupal's, but it's been around for ten years now and it's still getting upgraded (and I was able to get quick help on its support forum with the two issues I had). There are enough modules that I'm able to do pretty much everything I wanted to with it, although as I mentioned, with some data-migration issues (mainly related to location data; UHub now uses gmap and location now, but Backdrop doesn't have those, so I have to clean up the data and get it into its versions of geofield and leaflet).

By cybah on Wed, 01/29/2025 - 10:05am.

its like the email convo we had about WordPress. Your reasons for not going with Drupal 10 is are the same why I abandoned having a blog. So much back end administration that took up so much time vs just creating the content for the blog... it was too much.

But do other users of Backdrop a favor, document what you're doing and give it back to the community for development feed back. Uhub is probably one of the bigger sites that Backdrop will have so I bet they'd appreciate the feedback from a large site.

By adamg on Wed, 01/29/2025 - 11:24am.

And yeah, I said the conversion of basic content went easy, but that was only after I cleaned up, man, two decades of junk in the database that kept jamming up the content-conversion module (the db was filled with references and data for modules I hadn't used in years; dunno why it all stuck around after I'd "uninstalled" the modules).

By CopleyScott17 on Wed, 01/29/2025 - 8:29am.

In the last few days the site has been asking me to check a box to verify I'm human each time I visit (mobile, Android) even though I'm logged in. Wondering if this is a new precaution or some setting on my end, like VPN or something.

By adamg on Wed, 01/29/2025 - 8:42am.

Relates to performance problems here, hopefully I can turn it off with the switch to new software

By mg on Wed, 01/29/2025 - 10:18am.

@Adam - thank you for all the hard work you do! It's good for us all to be reminded that there's more to this than seeking out and writing up news. Being a news source plus the IT department is a couple of full time jobs!

By lbb on Wed, 01/29/2025 - 10:23am.

Your hard work is very much appreciated.

By Don't Panic on Wed, 01/29/2025 - 11:47pm.

You really do @adamg. Much appreciated.

By anon on Tue, 01/28/2025 - 7:07pm.

to keep a baseball bat within reach

By anon on Tue, 01/28/2025 - 9:14pm.

If they really want to get a reality slap, forget the automobiles. Hover above the scooters and revved up poppin' wheelie two wheelers racing up and down Arborway through Morton all night in the warmer temps!!!

By lbb on Wed, 01/29/2025 - 10:24am.

What does this have to do with automobiles OR scooter?

By Don't Panic on Wed, 01/29/2025 - 1:53am.

So I looked at Draganfly's press release and they do not specify where their prescribed flight route over Boston which HorizonMASS reported is;

From Draganfly:
The waiver, granted under 14 CFR §§ 107.39—Operations over human beings and 107.145—Operations over moving vehicles, allows Draganfly to conduct flights beyond the standard operational restrictions of FAA Part 107 regulations. The permissions cover a prescribed flight route over the city of Boston, emphasizing safety and reliability while operating within challenging and densely populated urban settings.

I guess the prescribed flight route is classified. Why is it classified?

By Greene on Wed, 01/29/2025 - 9:18am.

Because idiot paranoid mooks (like half the commenters here) would try to hunt them if they knew where to look.

By Geegester on Wed, 01/29/2025 - 9:53am.

if they are transporting stuff for hospitals, that could mean (or certain enterprising individuals could think it means) drugs. Which can be valuable, no matter if its Wegovy or opioids.

By Don't Panic on Thu, 01/30/2025 - 12:04am.

I guess I should have posted more of the press release:

From Draganfly
“This achievement allows us to deploy drones for critical applications in urban environments, including public safety, infrastructure inspection, and specialized mission support.”

This indicates to me that wherever the prescribed flight route is, it will be for working with the Boston Police, Boston Inspectional Services Department, and other Boston city agencies.

The drug delivery routes (if continued) are coordinated with different For Profit and Non-Profit hospitals in the area. They'd probably use a more parabolic flight path.

By Plen-T-Pak on Wed, 01/29/2025 - 11:27am.

Are drone weary folks also deplorable?

By Frelmont on Wed, 01/29/2025 - 10:21am.

Great. Wait ‘till one of these spy bots gets dive-bombed by a territorial raptor, or collides with a goose, or pigeon and you got a drone crashing town on someone’s head, or traffic with an H5N1 laden bird spiraling down with it.

By adamg on Wed, 01/29/2025 - 11:26am.

Only the drones in question are not carrying vials of infectious organisms (that we know of).

By Frelmont on Wed, 01/29/2025 - 2:37pm.

Insert Smiling Broadly emoji here.