Amazon Prime Air
November 30, 2015 6:00am by Barry Ritholtz
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Who do I sue when one of those things fall out of the air and hurt me?
Per the local news, it seems that stealing delivered packages from front porches is becoming a common crime.
So how about if the Amazon drone delivers the packages to your BACK porch/deck/yard (which is surrounded with an electrified fence)? Voila! Problem solved.
Now if you want more security, how about building a package delivery slide into the roof of your home? This would not work well for human delivery (which is why no one has built one yet!) but should not be a problem for a drone to access. It can hover over the trap door, cut the pack loose and whoosh, down it slides to your living room.
I hereby claim copyright on these ideas. [lol]
Sorry, I think Santa has the copy right for the last one.
I was not talking about a CHIMNEY…
As a pilot the idea of uncontrolled drones flying all over the place really scares me. You need some way of guaranteeing that these drones will not run into each other, people, animals or aircraft that are operating in the area. The big nightmare I fear is a drone crashing into an airliner and killing lots of people.
Our airways and the sophistication of technology required in the drones are not yet technologically up to the task of keeping the air safe with amazon’s drones and a lots of amateurs flying their toy drones in the same airspace. I doubt that amazon could make the drone deliveries cost effective because the level of technological reliability required to keep things safe would be too expensive.
It is a pipe dream ahead of its time. I would much rather amazon try this some place else.
Chris Schene
One delivery truck can carry hundreds of packages all deliverable by one person driving, a method that’s proven and reliable in urban areas. For remote locations a drone would be ideal because a long truck trip to deliver one package is very inefficient. For urban areas, drones would be a noisy nuisance, with a drone trip required for no more than a very few packages, and then only if they are light. There would be drones flying around everywhere all the time, creating a nuisance in one of the few places left that are not sources of noise – low altitude airspace, and all for the convenience of delivery in an hour instead of a day?
I’ll ask only half in jest: How long before the criminals start using drones to steal stuff out of peoples’ back yards, even yards ringed with electric fences? Of course, an anti-drone laser might deter this, but then we’d need new technology to tell authentic delivery drones from bogus thieving drones. You can see where this is leading, to an arms race.
A question I have not seen dealt with is how will these drones be controlled? If they are controlled from some regional remote facility, then they will probably need satellite communication modules on the drones, making them more expensive and perhaps worth stealing.
If the idea is to plug a GPS address in and just let the drone do its own thing, how would the drone navigate where to deposit the package? How about dealing with porch roofs, overhangs, eaves and so forth?