FAA Kills a Great Idea

via The Verge

A nearly unbelievable video of a drone that delivers 12-packs of beer to ice fishers on a frozen lake turns out to be too good to be true. Beermaker Lakemaid created the video as a riff on Amazon’s announcement on 60 Minutes last month, where the company showed a theoretical vision of a service that delivers small packages by air, autonomously. But where Amazon’s vision of the future is just that — a vision — Lakemaid was well into the process of creating such a service for local beer delivery, though those plans have been put on ice by the Federal Aviation Administration.

 
“They think it’s a great idea.”

“They think it’s a great idea, though they’re telling me to stop,” Lakemaid president Jack Supple told The Verge, adding that the FAA considers the project commercial and therefore off limits until those policies are reviewed and potentially revised next year.