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Amazon Reveals "Prime Air", Their Plans For 30-minute Deliveries By Drone
Z80xxc! writes "Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed during a CBS 60 Minutes interview that the company is working on a service called 'Prime Air' to deliver packages by autonomous octocopter drones within 30 minutes of hitting the 'buy' button. The plan still requires more testing and FAA approval, but Bezos predicts it'll be available to the public in the next 4-5 years.
With a lot of backlash against drones, and some towns even offering bounties to shoot them down, will this technology ever take off, or is this just another one of Amazon's eccentric CEO's fantastical flight ideas?"
1. This technology
2.Silk Road 2
3.?????
4. PROFIT!
Silence is a state of mime.
It seems like it would be a lot easier to steal from a drone than it would be to steal from a person delivering a package.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This is just a free-publicity stunt, timed for Xmas to get the word "Amazon" on all the news channels.
No sig today...
It's possible Bezos really means it, but my guess is that two things are behind it:
1. Using the current drone hype to help position Amazon as exciting/technological/futuristic, rather than just a boring logistics company that owns warehouses and brown cardboard boxes. With Google working on self-driving cars, and Elon Musk proposing a hyperloop and working on a reusable rocket, Amazon might want to join the futurology game. Otherwise they risk being seen as a low-margin but very efficient (and high-volume) mass retailer, the online version of Wal-Mart.
2. Provide some leverage in negotiations with the delivery and courier companies they depend on by threatening to bypass them. Amazon may want at least a halfway credible alternative to companies like UPS/Fedex when negotiating rates, something to hang over their head as "if you piss us off enough, we're really going to do it, we're going to just deliver everything with drones".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
How long till people start stealing the drones as they see one landing (by throwing a net on them for instance) and hack the firmware so they have their own drone?
This story nicely demonstrates how the modern media has no time (or desire) to think on their own.
This system is completely impractical. Anyone who has any idea on the capabilities of octocopters can immediately see that this idea is DOA.
- Range is abysmal. If you are not within walking distance of a distribution center, you are not in range of one of these. They could offer 10x better service for those within walking distance of their distribution hub by offering in-situ instant pickup if you are happy to walk to the center.
- Payload is non-existing - 0.5kg is quite a bit for an octocopter. Lets say they make a bigger "cargo" version and manage to quadruple that. 2kg. Too little for anything useful.
- Octocopters are good-weather toys. They cannot be flown in heavy winds. "Sorry, no deliveries today, it's too windy". Yeah. Right.
- The technology just isn't robust enough to be scaled up to meaningful numbers - crashes due to mechanical faults are inevitable, potentially hitting something and as a minimum causing an expensive tech toy wreck for Amazon. Often.
So this is purely a silly story to get Amazon into headlines right around "Cyber Monday" so buyers would remember that Amazon exists.
The NY Times, WashPost, BBC, Deutche Welle, Straits Times, South China Morning Post, Sydney Morning Herald and I'm only 1/2 was thru my RSS feeds. Now Starbucks, flying my morning latte through my kitchen window, that would be news!
Anything that's going to be "available within 4-5 years" is pretty much bullshit. A real plan would have a real date.
Mount a camera on the drone and let me watch my package flying over the landscape via the "Track my package" option.
Summation 2
Next up: package delivered by drone will sound a siren if not opened immediately.
Personally, I would like to go back to the good old days when we used owls for that.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
will be this.
Investors continue to give Bezos the benefit of the doubt, allowing him to reinvest Amazon's entire cash flow into the company with the expectation that "some day" Amazon will be able to flip an investment switch and suddenly become immensely profitable. Perhaps. But it seems to me Bezos just doesn't care about money and is using Amazon's money as his personal playpen.
If private organizations can't use drones to help with natural disasters, such as those in Colorado, how do you suppose this will get approved to fly near local airports and various cities and towns won't outlaw the flying of drones?
Of course, there's always the question: How do you deliver to high-rise apartments and other high-density dwellings?
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
For the uninitiated, that's marketingese for "we have no fucking clue."
From what I have read the drones can only deliver anywhere within a 10 mile radius of a fulfillment center. I am not anywhere near a fulfillment center so I am not sure how practical these would be. Unless they plan on building thousands of these centers all over the US.
Hate to break it to you, but the only aircraft that have to meet the safety standards that Boeing and Airbus meet are those running published airline routes.
The news helicopter flying overhead is regulated to a lower standard. The private jet carrying some CEO across the country is regulated to a lower standard. Larry Elison flying his own personal jet is regulated to an even lower standard still, and the guy buzzing over your house in the plane he built himself is regulated to the lowest standard of all.
That said, there are standards, and the FAA has standards for drones as well. The level of rigor largely depends on:
1. How heavy the plane is (a little RC aircraft might give your kid a cut if it crashed into them, a cessna would squish them like a bug).
2. Whether the operation is recreational or commercial (flying is expensive, so not too many people are put at risk if their free airplane ride is a bit risky - but self-sustaining operations are a different story).
3. Whether a commercial operation involves an airline route (if the CEO is paying for the plane he is riding on, chances are he's going to not be cheap on the maintenance budget - when you just buy a plane ticket you're at the mercy of the megacorp maintaining the plane).
For the most part commercial operations tend to be much safer than flying, and recreational operations tend to be about as safe as riding a motorcycle - more hazardous than a car, but not outside the realm of normal activity. Planes by their very nature tend to be fairly light, so their damage potential for those not in the cabin is actually pretty low when compared to the analogous ground-based activity (cars, trucks, trains, freighters, etc).
I'm sure the FAA would consider this a commercial operation and regulate it accordingly. Right now the regulations are actually so tight that anything but experimental/developmental use is impractical (usually you have to have human operators able to take manual control, observers watching the drone, etc). I imagine that they'll only remove the leash when somebody comes up with a system that is fairly robust. Besides, a drone capable of carrying a package any distance is going to be expensive - you wouldn't just want to be losing them due to failures all the time.
Yet another thing, along with self-driving cars, Google Books, and Google Glass, that Vernor Vinge's 2006 novel seems to be on track for.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
1. If a drone is downed, it will report it's last known GPS coords. If it's still online after crashing, it will probably live stream audio/video of what's happening to it.
2. Allow other drones out for delivery to swarm a downed drone to observe the perpetrators ad hoc until a dedicated incident drone can arrive to observe
3. Fry the electronics upon being downed so that they can't be stolen.
4. Initially ship only items that are of low cost, despite being of high value to the consumer. (i.e. hdmi cable, diapers, etc).
5. Initially only ship items which can be permanently disabled via serial number if the drone goes down. (i.e. kindle, cell phone, etc)
6. Initially have a large percentage of total drones be test drones with no shipments, so downing drones is not very profitable.
7. Have the drones fly totally unpredictable routes so that one can not anticipate their flight path.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.