Remember this day.
Yes, we know it's the day when we vote for local councillors, the burning issue here not so much the Straits of Hormuz as the straits the shopping centre has been in since a discovery of asbestos closed the laundrette and left me high, dry and dirty.
But tell me what Darlington is famous for besides car-theft? Correct! It's where the first steam locomotives were hauling a mix of ore, coal and passengers on dedicated lines, and whose bi-centennial we recently celebrated here on our very own weblog.
Well now it's famous for the first drone delivery outside the US, courtesy of Amazon and its on-off project that aims to get deliveries ~ of vital things in this instance like a box of rubber gloves to a swinging couple in the sticks with an erection that won't go away ~ in literally minutes.
As yet the range is limited to 7.50 miles and weight of carriage to a modest two kilos or five pounds. The ways drones have dropped packages to date include with a parachute, with a winch and as here, like shite from a seagull as Jeff Bezos explained earlier to the BBC.
The man running the proj says that together with the CAA the aim is for a level of safety on a par with airliners viz. a one in a billion chance of failure that experts have said is designed to strangle drones at birth in view of the fact it's a cardboard box that might be crashing and not a 500-ton Airbus.
And here I can only refer back to my own blog post called something like 'Primed and Cocked' about how northerners like me will shoot these things down for sport ~ the rich with shotguns and us with Airsoft ~ especially now they come with a Cartier watch inside.
For that's not a factor reducing the odds of airline accidents, but I venture it is with drones and I call Goodyear to the witness stand, whose airships are shot at once a week. The only place I recall where we were potentially (and actually) shot at in an airliner was Libya, but then after our peace-keeping efforts there anyone could buy any military hardware their heart desired.
It actually brings us full-circle back to local politics in the UK, however, designed to eliminate anything that doesn't protect property prices and/or fails risk-assessments from the get-go.
The first two 'skyports' that Amazon have put to the council have been rejected at the planning stage for being too noisy, especially given the likely effect on residents who don't even own an air-rifle in order to take matters into their own hands.
Welcome then to Britain, Jeff, and can I suggest that ~ like Marie Antoinette ~ you simply have them eat cake, dropped from a drone?
Ed. Pictured is the very first delivery. All of us in the UK have a driveway like that.
