Drone News: Amazon Manager Fired, World’s Fastest Drone, Stranded Boater Saved!

This week in Drone News, we have three stories for you. The first one is a question of whether Amazon fired someone for voicing safety concerns about the drone program, a new world record for the fastest drone, and yes, it was pretty fast. And then, lastly, a drone was used to locate a stranded boater. Let’s get to it.

Amazon manager fired

We’ll start this week with a former Amazon manager who claims that he was fired because of raising safety concerns about the drone delivery program. His name is Chetty Sket. He says that there was no onboarding process for new employees working on the drone project, and also that he witnessed multiple crashes, including one that started a brush fire, which I think we actually may have reported on back then.

He also said that tests were commonly conducted on partially inoperative equipment, such as laptops that had broken keyboards or even less than having a full team. Last year we reported on the fact that Amazon claimed that they didn’t need to tell the FAA about certain accidents in and instead that they would be able to investigate the accidents themselves.

Now, I have to say this is a little bit concerning. With as many flights as Amazon is predicting to do in the airspace, we certainly hope that this is something that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is gonna look into. Let us know what you think in the comments.

World’s fastest drone

Your second story this week is about a real fast drone, and I really mean it.

The old record for fastest FPV drone was set in 2017. By DRL and it was 163.5 miles per hour, which is booking. The new record shatters the old one at 224.

Now you can see the video playing in the background, or you maybe you may not be able to see it cuz it goes so fast. And while it doesn’t look like much, that drone was actually topping out at 235 miles per hour.

The record is actually the average between the two fastest runs. So back and forth, they average it out and then they figure it out. But yes, you, you may be wondering Part 107 does have limits. The speed limit is 100 miles per hour, which that piece of regulation is actually waiveable.

Now, we couldn’t verify that there was indeed a waiver for this specific flight, but it is a possibility.

Life saved with drone

The third story this week is a good one. It’s short, but a fire department in Washington State used a Thermal Drone in order to locate somebody that was lost in Liberty Bay on the boat while the boat was disabled in this case.

They experienced a mechanical failure, and then they were lucky to be able to call for help. Now, this is a great example of how drones can be used to save lives and make life, everybody’s life, a little bit better.

That’s it. That’s all we have for you. Don’t forget to like and subscribe. Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you next week.