What are they all ‘droning’ on about?

Back to Real Estate Committee publications

Alexandra Murphy
Mills Reeve, Manchester
alexandra.murphy@mills-reeve.com

Have you thought about how long you expect your delivery to take? Do you have a higher expectation now than say ten years ago?

Amazon has made progress in the field of online shipping with Amazon Prime launching in Britain in 2007, Amazon Locker in September 2011 and, most recently, Amazon Prime Air, its drone-based delivery system, making its first delivery in Cambridge on 7 December 2016.

The key questions for the property industry are how drone deliveries will physically be made to buildings, whether modern buildings are up to the challenge of accepting the parcels and whether old buildings can be retrofitted to ‘propel’ these changes in technology. Unfortunately, parcels cannot simply magically land from the sky into the consumer’s living room – how is their accommodation going to facilitate this?

There are some exciting innovation ideas for our new buildings; it’s interesting to see some developers and architects exploring the concept of drones that can access the interior of a building to deliver right to the point of the consumer or use landing platforms that are built into the sides of multi-storey buildings. A potential future solution has been explored by the design agency PriestmanGoode as part of the Great Festival of Innovation in Hong Kong in 2018. They showed a film called Dragonfly in which a number of luminous ultra-high-tech drones were launched from a boat to dock in high-rise buildings in an individual drawer that slides out of the side of the building from a specific apartment. While it may seem a bit Star Wars-esque, it could be a prospect for drone delivery, certainly for cities at least and a key way in which drone technology can be integrated into the fabric of a building.

What about existing buildings – can they cope with drone technology? Using balconies and roof space may be the answer for existing infrastructure. Roof space may be a useful solution in larger buildings such as industrial warehouses which may have the capability and square footage to accommodate landing pads. Amazon Prime Air has used landing pads featuring the Amazon symbol which drones can recognise as a landing point using sophisticated GPS systems, whereas Swiss Post uses infrared signals.

There are challenges around the carriage the drone can support in terms of weight and geographical scope as well as around the mechanisms for physical delivery. Drone use is limited to the size and power of their batteries. Perhaps we could use the model of electric cars in providing charge points for re-charging the drones en route, utilising roof space charging points or something like Amazon has done using patented ‘Kharpal’ charging locations on top of electric poles.

One of the other key challenges is around the legal framework surrounding airspace and legal ownership. British property law provides that a property owner owns the airspace above their property but to what extent and what parameters underpin this? This is usually defined as ‘up to the height which is necessary for use and enjoyment of the property’, but does this interfere with air space that drones need to use? Unfortunately technology has advanced at a pace that has far exceeded property statute. When the Civil Aviation Act (CAA) was drafted up in 1982, the issue of drone technology was probably not in contemplation, neither was it envisaged under the ancient Latin maxim cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos (the rights of the surface owner extend upwards to the heavens and downward toward the centre of the earth).

The airspace argument has been debated in many case law examples – usefully, Britain has embraced reviewing the regulatory framework to facilitate drone technology and equally the CAA is seen to be following suit. There is still a long way to go in terms of potential conflicts down the line with the advancement of this technology and existing legal framework.

Whether it’s through new infrastructure or retrofitting old buildings, we need to think carefully about how to be proactive in embracing drone technology to sit in harmony with the built environment. Perhaps we really need to prime our buildings for change and propel us into the new wave of technology development.