“The food was still warm inside the drone when the team arrived on site.” The spokesman for the electricity distributor Energex, Danny Donald, did not lack humor to recount the accident of a delivery drone from the operator Wing, on September 29 in Australia. The machine hit a power line.
More than 2,300 customers affected
Wing is a subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. It was the first company to operate drone deliveries in October 2019. A Wing spokesman said the accident occurred while the aircraft was performing a landing maneuver. “We immediately reported it to Energex, who went there,” he told ABC.
To safely recover the device, electricity distributor Energex had to cut power to its network. Thus, more than 2,300 customers in the suburb of Browns Plains, near the town of Logan, were deprived of electricity, indicates the Australian media. For most of them, the blackout lasted only 45 minutes, although 300 people had to wait three hours for power to be restored to their homes.
An unprecedented incident, taken lightly
The spokesperson confirmed that there was no permanent damage to the power grid. The food delivery company will not even have to pay the repair costs.
Local media also took the incident lightly. This is particularly the case for 10 news first queensland. In a tweet, the news outlet wrote, “If you’re wondering why food delivery is taking so long, it may be stuck on a power line.”
Unlike last year, this episode did not cause delivery services to stop. In September 2021, Wing’s drones fell victim to crow attacks, still in Australia. The company then grounded its devices for a few days to assess the risks these encounters could cause.
Source: BFM TV
