Amazon Promised Drone Delivery in Five Years Five Years Ago

I remember in 2013 when Amazon announced their 30 minute drone delivery system, the British bookshop Waterstones announced their competing O.W.L.S system https://www.waterstones.com/blog/introducing-o-w-l-s

Not Amazon but drone delivery is becoming a thing, a startup called Zipline is currently (successfully) running trials in Rwanda of drones that are used to deliver blood to hospitals where it would never be able to arrive in a timely fashion otherwise (because of terrain, poor access etc). From what I remember delivery time was about half an hour. It is however clearly not as elegant a solution as Amazon was proposing with their quadcopters, Zipline uses scaled model airplanes with an old-school tail catch system for "landing" (same concept on aircraft carriers). Not "elegant" but certainly gets the job done. I know I saw a YouTube video covering this recently but cannot find the link sadly.

Five years ago, just before Christmas, everyone was taking about Amazon drone delivery. My hairdresser brought it up to me. My dad was talking about getting his guns out of storage so he could take a pot shot or two. A lot of people who had never ordered a single thing from Amazon were bringing it up. Just before Christmas. Pretty effective if you ask me.

Well... Drone delivery may work in countryside, where people live in personal homes not apartments, perhaps with a bit of green flat area suitable for landing and leave a small package.

It's essentially unfeasible in cities where nearly anyone live in apartments, with dense roads, no clearly identifiable landing site, no place to fly without being on to of many people's head etc.

I dream a society in which we are few enough to live all in large are and we can easily travel with personal STOL small planes and goods can travel longer paths on waterway/railway to be delivered by truck or planes only for the last small trip. But that's a dream really hard to realize especially these days.

It's the same for electric cars: I'd love them if they have small rechargeable batteries like water bottle basket that I can simply change by hand and their charge last long as traditional car range or better. I'd love to have small "generators" on board like Star Trek reactors, but that's a dream. And I do live in reality, at least last time I checked...

So many negative comments. I still think it’s cool, and hope it will be a reality soon enough. Definitely not a stupid idea.

It's not technology problem but execution problem. The 5 lbs/20 mi drones are quite feasible in wide urban areas to pre-selected customers. FAA is no longer a problem. It's all about deploy to small group, iterate and expand. But team there seems to be taking extra-ordinarily cautious approach until everything gets perfect - which it probably never will. Typically you don't see media to follow up on 5 year old promises of a CEO so this could very well might be hit piece generated by some insider. Anyway, I suppose Paul Viola's days there are numbered now. It's surprised they survived this long under Bezos without delivering anything at all.

The whole thing was always for PR purposes anyway. It's not a coincidence that it was announced on December 1st, right at the beginning of Christmas shopping season.

I have no doubt they hired real engineers to build a real prototype. Maybe they even hoped it could turn out to be practical. But the primary motivation and the end game was always to get people talking about Amazon during the critical shopping period.

(On a side note, the whole thing has a striking symbolic aspect to it. How does Santa Claus deliver Christmas goodies? He magically flies to your house and delivers them directly from the sky. And the drones do exactly the same thing.)

...and it’s still no closer to being practical, legal, or safe.

Small drones have a very limited range and payload capacity. And how would they deliver to offices or apartments (with no private garden or driveway to land or drop the parcels)? How would they avoid collisions with anything from skyscrapers to trees to power lines? (Does that level of 3D map data exist yet)

How do they prevent the risk of propellor related injuries, or of stolen drones (perhaps even shot down ‘for the loot’)

Then there’s the FAA (and other aviation regulators worldwide) to deal with.

Still seems like a marketing stunt for now, or a much-longer-term goal

There's a 2014 episode of Parks & Recreation (set in 2017) where Ron shoots a delivery drone from a fictional company called Gryzzl, because it was flying over his property.

How on earth would drone delivery work in a country where there are more guns than people? And for places where there aren't that many, there are plenty of pranksters that would happily try taking one of these down to reignite their failing Youtube channel.

Contemporaneous hn discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6830566

Given the FAA rules on this (line of sight from operators), there's just no way that this could work. It basically defeats the whole purpose of using autonomous drones in the first place. Even if the rules were modified in their favor, it's dubious whether the infrastructure investment and potential for liability would be worth it for Amazon.

Stupid idea still stupid idea and they’re hoping everyone will forget.

the same as 2020 for self driving cars. more like 2030 or 2040.

Didn't this start as an April Fool's joke by Amazon?

Five years ago drones were faddish, now they're not

The first Prime AIR stuff was just a marketing attack on the Apple Air tablet to spike traffic for its own tablet. All Apples Air name maketing got lost in the Prime Air story's.