The first drone was a hot air balloon and flew in 1783, when the French Revolution was still far away. In 1849 similar drones were used for the first time by the Austrians to conduct the bombardment of Venice, fortunately with little success. Ten years later the first aerial photograph was taken from a hot air balloon in Paris, but unfortunately it was lost. At the turn of the century Alfred Nobel patented a system for attaching a camera to a rocket to take a photo, and two photos were actually taken this way after his death – they weren’t much.
The first unmanned aircraft dates back to the First World War and today they are the norm in war. This is to say that the history of drones goes back a long way, but there has been talk of their widespread use for civilian life for about ten years, more or less since a French startup presented a model at a fair in Las Vegas that it could be controlled with a smartphone. It was a turning point. In the 2013 Jeff Bezos promised that one day Amazon would make the deliveries this way and now we are almost there: after some tests in California and Texas, we will start at the end of 2024 in Italy and the United Kingdom, deliveries within an hour in certain areas.
E the surprise is Italy which is not exactly the most advanced country when it comes to experimenting with new technologies. And yet we are ahead on drones. L’ENAC, the body that manages civil aviation, rightly considers them a new economic sector to be developed and is signing various agreements to regulate and allow their use. The examples are plentiful. 2024 will be the year of Fiumicino-Rome flights with Volocopter, a drone that will take two passengers to the capital’s airport in twenty minutes (initially with the pilot, but later without). And always a few days ago ENAC has authorized the use of the Jetson One, a vertical take-off aircraft that a Swedish startup has been developing and testing for a few years south of Florence (it has already sold 300 examples at 98 thousand dollars each). In short, something is changing: the era of flying cars is perhaps closer than we thought.
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