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New $20,000 Russian mail drone takes flight, immediately crashes into wall

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New $20,000 Russian mail drone takes flight, immediately crashes into wall
05 April 2018

Drones are cool, aren’t they? Delivering things, flailing around with chainsaws attached, cutting our hair: we are living in the future. 

And in recent years, that move from “utopian/dystopian fantasy” to “actually maybe this could be pretty useful if I want to get useless things delivered to my office within two hours as if anything less convenient to me will literally kill me” has well and truly taken place. In 2017, Amazon trialled its first Air delivery, claiming to have delivered the goods within a supremely impressive THIRTEEN MINUTES.

New technology doesn’t always work so smoothly, though. Take this drone, for example, worth a not insignificant $20,000. 

Designed by Rudron and Expeditor 3M and launching in the Siberian town of Ulan-Ude, the drone was meant to deliver mail for the Russian Post for the first time. 

It did not deliver the mail.

It crashed into a wall. Obviously it crashed into a wall.

Organiser Alexei Tsydenov told Reuters that the “100 plus WiFi signals in the area” may have played a part in the crash, though tech website Engadget point out that “mail drones have flown in denser urban areas than this, so it’s not as if WiFi is guaranteed to cause havoc” – so that may just have been a handy excuse for a sort of badly planned drone launch.

Tsydenov says he’s going to “keep trying”. Godspeed, bro. Godspeed.

(Image: Pexels)