Amazon’s ‘Delivery Drone’ Blues

from 21st Century wire.com: 

When we first heard that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had the wacky idea of having drones deliver packages straight to your house – we wrote it off as totally potty, and the typical techno-ravings of a Silicon Valley futurist after a glass of Chardonnay and a spliff. But they are dead serious about this, and will not stop until it’s a reality.

This week we learned that the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) have approved ‘delivery drones’ – so long as Amazon changes everything. The FAA say they are willing to let Amazon test their drones under an special ‘experimental license’inside the US, but not doing deliveries, only flight tests.

Regardless, Amazon is already building the process out. Popular Sciencedescribes what Bezos has already hammered out:

“In the video Amazon Prime Air released for the concept, there’s no pilot in sight. At a warehouse, a human loads the package into a special container, where a conveyor belt takes it to a drone, which then flies up from a landing pad over the factory through a field and to a distant house. In order to accomplish drone deliveries, Amazon either needs to launch the drones from delivery trucks, or it needs the drones to fly autonomously and beyond the line-of-sight of pilots. For the latter (and likelier) scenario, neither component is allowed by the FAA. As Jason Koebler notes at Motherboard, “it’ll prevent Amazon from actually ​delivering packages over any kind of appreciable distance.”

Still, there are some lingering technical obstacles that even the wizards of Seattle will have trouble overcoming…

Continue this article at WSJ Online

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