Amazon testing delivery by drone

Daily News Article   —   Posted on December 3, 2013

(by Alistair Barr, USA Today) – Amazon.com is testing delivering packages using drones, CEO Jeff Bezos said on the CBS TV news show 60 Minutes Sunday.

The idea would be to deliver packages as quickly as possible using the small, unmanned aircraft, through a service the company is calling Prime Air, the CEO said.

Bezos played a demo video on 60 Minutes that showed how the aircraft, also known as octocopters, will pick up packages in small yellow buckets at Amazon’s fulfillment centers and fly through the air to deliver items to customers after they hit the buy button online at Amazon.com.

The goal of the new delivery system is to get packages into customers’ hands in 30 minutes or less, the world’s largest Internet retailer said. Putting Prime Air into commercial use will take “some number of years” as Amazon develops the technology further and waits for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to come up with rules and regulations, the company added.

Bezos told 60 Minutes that the service could be up and running in as few as four years – although he noted that he is an optimist when it comes to such things.

“One day, Prime Air vehicles will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today,” the company said.

This is the latest futuristic effort by Bezos, who was an e-commerce pioneer in the 1990s and more recently popularized the e-reader – while pursuing personal projects such as private spaceflight and a 10,000-year clock built inside a mountain.

Drones have mostly been used by the U.S. military to shoot missiles at enemy combatants in countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, the cost of these unmanned aircraft has dropped precipitously in recent years, making them more accessible to commercial users, such as companies, small businesses and entrepreneurs.

However, the FAA currently limits the use of drones in the U.S. to public entities such as police forces and hobbyists, meaning the devices cannot be used in return for payment. The regulator said recently that it plans to have regulations governing commercial use in place by 2015.

“The FAA would not let Amazon do this now,” said Ryan Calo, an expert on robotics, privacy and the law at the University of Washington. “But this is precisely the type of application that Congress had in mind when it told the FAA in 2012 to come up with rules for commercial unmanned aircraft.”

Amazon will be able to petition the FAA to show them how its drone delivery technology works and the company can also apply to test its drones to make sure they are air worthy,he added.

“Amazon will not be able to darken the skies of Seattle with drones. They will need a plan for safety,” Calo said. “But I see no reason why this application won’t fly.”

If drone delivery takes off, it could be a threat to FedEx and UPS, which Amazon uses for a lot of its deliveries now. Indeed, FedEx founder Fred Smith told Wired magazine in 2009 that the company wanted to switch their fleet to drones as soon as possible but that it had to wait for the FAA to regulate such activity.

“We’ll be ready to enter commercial operations as soon as the necessary regulations are in place,” Amazon said Sunday. “Safety will be our top priority, and our vehicles will be built with multiple redundancies and designed to commercial aviation standards.”

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Background

The Real Reason Amazon Announced Delivery Drones Last Night: $3 Million In Free Advertising On Cyber Monday:

Last night, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos went on "60 Minutes" and announced that Amazon's R&D department is working on drones that can deliver packages within 30 minutes. He called the service Amazon Prime Air.

The thing is, Amazon Prime Air won't be available for many years.

Even Bezos said last night that the earliest Amazon Prime Air could be in service is 2015 because that's the soonest the FAA could update its laws.

But The Wall Street Journal reports that the FAA isn't planning on beginning the certification of commercial drones until 2020.

There is a good reason for this. Drones can be very dangerous.

In March 2013, a commercial airliner flew within 200 feet of a small drone flying at 1,750 feet over a neighborhood in New York. The collision would have killed hundreds of people.

A retired commercial pilot named Tom Jeffries told ABC15.com the airliner almost hit the drone because drones don't appear on radar. 

Jeffries says:  “You’re never going to see them until they hit something. When they suck one of those drones into the engine of an airplane, then it’ll get everybody’s attention.”

The fact is, there is a very good chance that, last night, Amazon "announced" a service that will never exist in reality.

Why did Amazon do that?

The answer is free advertising. Even better: free advertising the night before the biggest e-commerce shopping day of the year, Cyber Monday.

How much was that free advertising worth?

"60 Minutes" gave more than 15 minutes to its Amazon story. A 30-second spot during the 7 p.m. show usually costs just over $100,000.

If you figure Amazon got 30 30-second commercials' worth of time, you can estimate that it got about $3 million worth of "earned" media. 

But $3 million is probably a very low estimate. That's just the cost Amazon would have had to pay to reach "60 Minutes'" 13 million viewers. Thanks to all the coverage Amazon Prime Air has gotten in other outlets, many more millions of people are talking about the companytoday.

The funny thing is, talking about "drones" is a fairly common PR stunt at this point.

After the "60 Minutes" show last night, a Hacker News reader compiled a list of previously announced delivery drone programs, many of which were also PR stunts:

• Textbook drone delivery

• Cake drone delivery

• Pizza drone delivery

• Parcel delivery drones

• Beer delivery drones

• Taco delivery drones

• Sushi delivery drones

• General delivery drones

(From businessinsider.com.  Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.)