A spokesperson for drone-delivery company Manna says that it accommodates the requests it gets from residents to stay away from the air over their property.
“A leaflet came in the door,” said Deirdre O’Neill.
She had been musing what to do next, she said, to put an end to the noise of delivery drones whirring over her home, in a quiet cul-de-sac not far from Blanchardstown village.
The negative impact of drone noise on health seems currently to be underrated, according to a report by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Network of European agencies.
O’Neill says they are a constant annoyance and a complete invasion of her quiet space.
The leaflet that came in O’Neill’s door was from residents’ group Drone Action D15, and it suggested she write to the delivery company, Manna, and make a “no-fly request”.
So she copied the wording and did. But O’Neill says that drones still fly right over, despite that and an earlier email. Other residents who have asked for the courtesy say the same.
Exactly how many people have asked for a block on drones flying over their properties is a matter of dispute. Drone Action D15 gives a higher figure than Manna.
A spokesperson for Manna said the company couldn’t comment on particular cases, for privacy reasons. But it has accommodated the no-fly requests it has received as a courtesy, he said.
Annemarie O’Reilly, a spokesperson for Drone Action D15, said the group is still encouraging people to ask for the geoblock.
As she understands it, there’s no legal requirement on Manna to respect those requests to mark those properties as off limits, she says. But for the group, it is a way to demonstrate the degree the deliveries are disrupting people’s lives, she says.
In response to queries about whether there is any obligation on Manna to engage with no-fly requests, a spokesperson for the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) pointed to section 55 of the Air Transport and Navigation Act.
That says that “no action shall lie in respect of trespass or in respect of nuisance, by reason only of the flight of aircraft over any property at a height above the ground, which, having regard to wind, weather, and all the circumstances of the case is reasonable”.
“It’s only a small little garden,” said O’Neill, last Friday. She slides open the glass doors that lead from her kitchen and living room to the outside courtyard.
The space – with lattice chairs and strings of big bulbs – is greened with leafy plants and bushes.
It isn’t the oasis it once was though, she says. Drones buzz through overhead or nearby through the day.
“There must be at least 15 in an hour, it must be, at certain times,” she says.
Her neighbours order, she says, and she can hear how excited the kids seem by the deliveries.
She would never say anything to them, she says. But it means that the drones, even when they don’t pass directly over her home, lower and drop the food not far away.
Even before she got the leaflet, she had tried to reach out to Manna, she says. On 7 July, she was at her wits’ end and emailed in to the company’s generic email address.
“I request you stop flying over my house multiple times per hour with repetitive flights on the exact same path,” she said. “Two drones just went overhead straight behind each other within seconds.”
She didn’t get a response to that, she says.
But after she got the leaflet from Drone Action D15, she tried emailing its suggested email address, and asked on 9 August that her Eircode be made a “no fly zone” for commercial delivery drones.
On 14 August, Manna responded: “If you would like to request an opt-out directly, we’d be happy to review it. To date, we’ve offered this as a courtesy and review requests on a case-by-case basis.”
She replied the same day. She was making a direct request, she said. “Can you confirm please what exactly you need from me to process my request?”
O’Neill didn’t hear back about that, she says – and emailed to follow up on 28 August to see if it was being actioned.
O’Reilly, the spokesperson for Drone Action D15, says that after she put in a no-fly request last year, the drones seemed to stop coming over her house for a while.
But more recently, they are back again, she says.
Patricia Cautley emailed Manna in October last year to ask that Manna stopped flying over her garden and house.
“We use our garden an awful lot,” she says. Her husband gardens and she sits outside and reads books.
But “the noise of it is just phenomenal”, she says. “They can hover for quite a while as well, it’s just intolerable to be honest.”
And despite their no-fly request, drones continue to pass overhead sometimes, she says. “They aren’t doing it.”
In July, CEO Bobby Healy said at the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport that it had received 25 no-fly requests and honored them.
When people make no-fly requests, Manna asks for their Eircodes, he said. “We block the perimeters of their properties so the drone would not fly over them,” he said.
The block is permanent, he said. “As far as I am aware, we have never removed a block, and I do not see why we would.”
Last week, a spokesperson for Manna said that it had to date received and accommodated fewer than 100 no-fly requests, while the area it delivers to has about 44,000 Eircodes.
He forwarded several quotations from happy customers.
Drone Action D15 asked residents to copy the group into emails that they sent, so it could tally them.
Its count is that residents had made 185 requests in the time between a leaflet campaign that it ran at the start of the month and 18 August when it compiled the data.
O’Reilly, a spokesperson for Drone Action D15, said that the group grew out of an email thread of concerned residents.
They had all been emailing councillors and TDs, she said – and one put them all in an email thread, and someone suggested that they meet and organise.
They first met in Socialist Party TD Ruth Coppinger’s office, but they aren’t party political, she says.
O’Reilly says that drones are fabulous technology, already working in so many great ways – surveying, infrastructure, search and rescue. “But those are time-bound intermittent projects.”
The delivery drones and noise, though, is never ending. Day in, day out, she says.
At an IAA-hosted drone symposium in May 2019, Healy said that Manna’s drones “will be invisible and inaudible at cruise speed”, according to a write-up of the event.
But Manna-commissioned research, carried out by associate professor John Kennedy at Trinity College Dublin, found that noise from the drones reaches up to 59dBA at a house directly under the route while cruising at 65m.
When it drops to deliver, the noise reaches 66 dBA to 68 dBA, the research found. It says that the flow of steady traffic in a typical urban setting gives background noise of 52 dBA.
Cautley, the resident, says that she gets angry when she hears that Manna representatives say that the sound is about the same as ambient traffic. “It’s just infuriating and it’s very patronising as well.”
Says Rose Masterson, another resident: “It’s not like a lawnmower in the background. We’re all familiar with what that sounds like.”
Part of the issue is that the annoyance is not just about volume.
The EPA Network report on drone noise says that, “drones have a distinctive and unusual sound, depending on the model and type, that is shown to be more annoying than other transport sounds, including aircraft noise.”
Drones may not be very loud compared to some other vehicles such as airplanes or trains, it says. “But as they fly relatively close to people and houses, the sound immission levels at receiver positions can be significant.”
The acoustic features may also negatively affect the “dose-response functions” it says – meaning how big an impact it has on somebody’s health or how significant a stressor the noise is.
“This will require adequate measures to prevent annoyance, sleep disturbance and other health impacts,” it says.
The report suggests: “lower sound power levels and less intrusive sound quality, perhaps low noise take-off and landing procedures, optimizing flight paths to prevent flying in noise-sensitive areas, and introducing no-fly zones and/or times”.
“Noise from drones should be regarded as a serious threat to future public health and well-being,” says the report, endorsed by Ireland’s EPA.
“Governmental authorities as well as the drone industry should start discussing and communicating it as such, rather than a mere issue of societal acceptance,” the report says.
Manna has said that it has applied to the IAA to fly higher, and has been working on quieter drones.
The EPA Network paper also says that the European Commission should communicate that noise from drone transport is included in their definition of “transport noise” in its Zero Pollution Action Plan.
That plan sets a target to reduce the share of people chronically disturbed by transport noise by 30 percent, it says.
That transport noise should include “drone noise”, the report says, citing the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Environment. And, drone noise should be taken into account in cities’ noise action plans too, it says, but no guidance has been issued on that.
That target for overall transport noise hasn’t been transposed yet into law in Ireland, notes Dublin City Council’s Noise Action Plan published in January this year – which doesn’t mention drones.
Meanwhile, the government’s new national policy framework for drones says that unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) geographical zones and U-space should help address concerns around, among other issues, the environment and noise.
The IAA can and does establish UAS geographical zones, areas where drone operations may be prohibited or conditional on rules. U-space is the airspace where drones can fly around, subject to a kind of air traffic management system.
Under EU regulations, the IAA can designate geographical zones to minimise safety risks, protect privacy, address security issues, and deal with environmental concerns such as noise.
The new national policy framework for drones includes a national working group on these zones to create transparent processes and procedures for designating them.
State agencies and councils will then request zones through the IAA in line with those procedures, said a spokesperson for the IAA.
Residents in Glasnevin have been calling for their area to be made a geographical zone to restrict drones and keep it as a quiet area.
Carl Cautley, a local resident, says he thinks that any new rules around geographical zones are just going to enable and cement an expansion of drone operators.
“They’re still going to be intrusive, still going to make a noise, and there’ll be 50 times more of them flying out,” he said.
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