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The autonomous drone - dubbed 184 - can carry one passenger and was developed by Chinese company EHang.  A prototype was shown off at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, with the company hoping to sell the drones later this year.  Experts were divided over whether such a system would have mass appeal. Officials from the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems granted permission for the drone to be tested and offered to help EHang submit the results to the Federal Aviation Administration in a bid to win further approval.  It is not clear whether the drone will carry a passenger during tests.  "I personally look forward to the day when drone taxis are part of Nevada's transportation system," the institute's business development director, Mark Barker,told local the Las Vegas Review Journal. The prototype drone is over 4ft (1.2m) tall, weighs 440lb (200kg) and has eight propellers.  It can carry a single passenger for 23 minutes at 60mph...

The races were hard fought and - according to the commentators - full of thrills and spills.  The stadium was empty, apart from a box full of journalists protected by a net, but perhaps in a few years' time huge crowds will gather to watch drone racing. We've heard today how ESPN plans to turn drone racing into a major TV sport - but before it's ready for live spectators, a few issues will need to be sorted out.  Such as how can you actually see what is going on. As the tiny drones whizzed past me last night it was almost impossible to spot them, let along work out who was winning. But the organisers of the event, the mobile network EE, the chip maker Qualcomm and this new sport's organising body the European Rotor Sports Association believe that together they can create an absorbing live experience. We were shown two other views of the races. First, via the FPV (first person view) headsets the racers themselves wear to guide their drones with amazing skill aro...

It used data on bird strikes to get a sense of what would happen if a small drone collided with a plane.  Only 3% of collisions between aircraft and birds similar in weight to domestic drones result in damage, found the George Mason University researchers.  An even smaller number caused injuries to humans, it found, and many of these were caused by flocks of birds.The research project was prompted by the recent introduction of rules in the US that make owners of drones weighing more than 250g register their craft with the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).  "Contrary to sensational media headlines, the skies are crowded not by drones, but by fowl," wrote Eli Dourado and Samuel Hammond in an article summarising their research.  US airspace is home to about 10 billion birds, said the researchers, but collisions between fowl and aircraft have remained rare. The pair analysed 25 years of data gathered by the FAA on bird strikes to determine what damage ...

Joysticks at their fingertips, the mostly male students packing the classroom lift their virtual helicopters into the air, part of a new cottage industry that's sprung up in China: drone pilot schools.  China is already the world's biggest drone manufacturer, churning out remote-controlled lying machines that range from 3-D urban mappers to tear-gas spraying models for police. But it lacks qualified pilots to fly them.  Young men in particular are flocking to drone schools such as TT Aviation Technology Co, one of more than 40 in China, hoping to land a potentially lucrative job in an exciting new field. TT Aviation offers a two-week intensive course for $1,200 where students learn regulations and how to pilot using simulators and real drones. At the end of the course, they can try to earn the license required by China's Civil Aviation Administration to operate drones that are heavier than 7 kilograms and fly higher than 120 metres.  Xu Honggang, 24, believes...