safe. “The larger you get, the more dangerous you get.” Logistical problems are in the middle of being solved in some very dramatic ways, Huber said. At a recent conference, he said, a disaster relief drone firm, SkyCatch, demonstrated a robot that could autonomously take off and, when it got tired, land on its own charging station. “It would land and take off and, when it ran low on batteries, it would land, exchange the batteries and take off again,” he said. Of course, safety remains a major concern – Singh points out that, for a commercial aircraft to be considered skyworthy, it has to prove a rate of one serious failure every 1m hours. Drones, he said, are “one or two orders of magnitude away” from that benchmark. “The Reaper drone has one failure in 10,000 hours,” Singh said. An oil leak, by the way, doesn’t count as catastrophic failure – something has to fall out of the sky. “We’re closing the gap,” Singh said. “There’s a lot of interest.” Part of this is simply that air travel is inherently dangerous and, thus, standards are much higher. “If you fly commercial airlines, often they’ll say, ’Oh, a component has failed – we have to go back to the gate,’” Singh said. “And that’s an established industry with 60 years of legacy! I shudder to think that one of these things might come down on a crowded highway.” Part of