6 ms·

Amazon Promised Drone Delivery in Five Years Five Years Ago

gonesilent 8y ago
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.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  Very interesting. Is that speculation or do you have sources on that?
- oldgradstudent 8y ago
  I vaguely recall it was a PR attack against multiple reports about the work conditions in their warehouses, especially in the UK. One example that appeared the week before the reveal: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-25034598 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-25034598
- unfunco 8y ago
  So Amazon knew that Apple were going to release a new iPad called the iPad Air, and to take away some of the press coverage upon the release, decided to engineer parcel delivering drones so they could capitalise on the usage of the word air?
JoeSmithson 8y 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 https://www.waterstones.com/blog/introducing-o-w-l-s
laluser 8y ago
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.
- ehsankia 8y ago
  Which is why Google is testing theirs in Australia. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/17/alphabet-google-tests-project-wing-drone-hybrid-delivering-burritos-rural-australia https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/17/alphabet-...
  - laluser 8y ago
    Yep, Amazon is testing in other places as well.
bluescrn 8y ago
...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
setquk 8y ago
Stupid idea still stupid idea and they’re hoping everyone will forget.
- scarejunba 8y ago
  Amazon has no fear of failure. The Fire phone comes to mind. They roll with the punches and just go on to the next product. They also have the scale to explore every ‘stupid idea’ to some degree. Good for them. I doubt they’re “hoping everyone will forget”. More they just abandon what doesn’t work.
  - kjullien 8y ago
    This is pretty much the spirit of Google too, start a service, have no users, discontinue service. The problem with this is that most of these ideas don't work because they are usually too early for their time. Which is quite stupid when you think about it retroactively. If they kept going at it, Google could of had a successful social media platform (Dodgeball), they discontinued the v1 of Instagram, Picasa and they could of been Foursquare with Hotpot... Now the question is was it a good idea to stop these and maybe save a couple hundred K a year ? Retroactively, of course no, but I would argue that even at the time it was a bad idea, why waste RnD when you can easily afford to keep it going for decades without it generating any profit... Move fast and break things but don't trash them...
- vorticalbox 8y ago
  I think everyone knows by now that the internet does not forget.
- veidr 8y ago
  It wasn't a stupid idea, it was just an especially shameless lie. We all knew it was bullshit; Amazon must have also known it. But they bullshitted their way to an astonishing degree of news coverage. Probably a majority of local news channels covered it, as did almost all the major newspapers. Like many of you here probably were, I was asked about it by all sorts of nontechnical friends / relatives / strangers who just found out I do software and robotics / etc. I personally am not hoping everyone will forget; I'm hoping they will remember me saying "Oh, no, that's bullshit — it's just a money-losing marketing stunt, not something that they will actually start doing."
butisaidsudo 8y ago
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.
adrianmonk 8y ago
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.)
- anonymous5133 8y ago
  Probably true. The irony is that many other companies sprang up to actually build real drone delivery companies. There is one in Singapore (can't recall the name) that basically is trying to build drone landing ports (with lockers for storage) on each building in Singapore. The way it works is after you place your order, the drone is dispatched to the locker to make the delivery. The customer goes to the roof of the building where the locker is which then they use a code (sent by sms/e-mail) to open the locker. I thought it was a genius idea. Edit: Looked it up. The company is called airbus with their skyways drone system. It is not related to the aerospace company of the same name.
- dbliss 8y ago
  As an engineer with Amazon, I can say with 100% (edit: 99.99%) certainty (without any insider knowledge on the drone program), that PR was not the primary driver of this. I would say you have it backwards. Amazon hired engineers to build it (and probably still are) THEN used it as a PR opportunity. To say "The whole thing was always for PR purposes anyway" is a fundamental misunderstanding of how Amazon works internally.
  - 8note 8y ago
    More likely, somebody wanted to have fun with drones, then went about trying to sell it to amazon higher ups
zupa-hu 8y ago
So many negative comments. I still think it’s cool, and hope it will be a reality soon enough. Definitely not a stupid idea.
- jcims 8y ago
  The article was overly negative IMHO. Guy sounds like a whiner.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tinkerteller 8y ago
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.
PunchTornado 8y ago
the same as 2020 for self driving cars. more like 2030 or 2040.
kjullien 8y ago
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.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  I never heard of this before, made my day, thanks :) https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zipline+rwanda https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zipline+rwanda http://www.flyzipline.com/ http://www.flyzipline.com/
- Jyaif 8y ago
  Planes require much more engineering to deal with than quadcopters, but they are way more efficient, and thus the right long term solution.
- ThePadawan 8y ago
  The landing procedure is really amazing to watch - and I personally find it elegant as in "it solves a difficult problem very easily". Maybe not elegant as in "ballet" or "like the smooth landing of a passenger plane".
- walrus01 8y ago
  Zipline essentially scaled down and copied Insitu (now Boeing)'s method for landing a ScanEagle drone.
glenrivard 8y ago
"Wing, Alphabet’s drone delivery business, to begin a pilot in Finland in Spring 2019" https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/04/wing-takes-flight-in-finland/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/04/wing-takes-flight-in-finla...
twoodfin 8y ago
Contemporaneous hn discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6830566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6830566
Dowwie 8y ago
Didn't this start as an April Fool's joke by Amazon?
- slededit 8y ago
  Their recruiters used it to show how cool they were - so I don’t think so.
xte 8y ago
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...
- 8note 8y ago
  my apartment in Seattle has a specific drone landing spot
  - xte 8y ago
    May I ask how a drone can locate your apartment? Because I can easily imaging to give coordinates of a garden with a precision suitable for a delivery but I can't imaging something that can really work in apartments... Perhaps penthouse apartments, perhaps some new apartments with specially crafted sign to be identified with reasonable safety by the drone but certainly not something that can work at a scale...
  - balt_s 8y ago
    https://www.google.com/search?q=seattle+apartments+with+drone+landing+pad https://www.google.com/search?q=seattle+apartments+with+dron... Sounds dubious.
xkcd-sucks 8y ago
Five years ago drones were faddish, now they're not
rchaud 8y ago
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.
- kirykl 8y ago
  They’ll equip the drones with military grade defensive avoidance and ground object tracking of course
  - rchaud 8y ago
    That'll be reserved for members of Prime Platinum.
- jhayward 8y ago
  It is illegal to discharge a firearm in almost all incorporated areas in the United States, barring a very unusual emergency need. Almost all drone flights would be, statistically, in these areas. So probably not even worth worrying about as a problem.
  - 8note 8y ago
    in Canada up north, people shoot at passing airplanes fairly frequently
robdachshund 8y ago
Hard to take the author seriously when he mentions "the global rise of fascism."

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.

jjeaff 8y ago
Very interesting. Is that speculation or do you have sources on that?
oldgradstudent 8y ago
I vaguely recall it was a PR attack against multiple reports about the work conditions in their warehouses, especially in the UK. One example that appeared the week before the reveal: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-25034598 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-25034598
unfunco 8y ago
So Amazon knew that Apple were going to release a new iPad called the iPad Air, and to take away some of the press coverage upon the release, decided to engineer parcel delivering drones so they could capitalise on the usage of the word air?

JoeSmithson 8y 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 https://www.waterstones.com/blog/introducing-o-w-l-s

laluser 8y ago

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.

ehsankia 8y ago
Which is why Google is testing theirs in Australia. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/17/alphabet-google-tests-project-wing-drone-hybrid-delivering-burritos-rural-australia https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/17/alphabet-...
- laluser 8y ago
  Yep, Amazon is testing in other places as well.

bluescrn 8y ago

...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

setquk 8y ago

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

scarejunba 8y ago
Amazon has no fear of failure. The Fire phone comes to mind. They roll with the punches and just go on to the next product. They also have the scale to explore every ‘stupid idea’ to some degree. Good for them. I doubt they’re “hoping everyone will forget”. More they just abandon what doesn’t work.
- kjullien 8y ago
  This is pretty much the spirit of Google too, start a service, have no users, discontinue service. The problem with this is that most of these ideas don't work because they are usually too early for their time. Which is quite stupid when you think about it retroactively. If they kept going at it, Google could of had a successful social media platform (Dodgeball), they discontinued the v1 of Instagram, Picasa and they could of been Foursquare with Hotpot... Now the question is was it a good idea to stop these and maybe save a couple hundred K a year ? Retroactively, of course no, but I would argue that even at the time it was a bad idea, why waste RnD when you can easily afford to keep it going for decades without it generating any profit... Move fast and break things but don't trash them...
vorticalbox 8y ago
I think everyone knows by now that the internet does not forget.
veidr 8y ago
It wasn't a stupid idea, it was just an especially shameless lie. We all knew it was bullshit; Amazon must have also known it. But they bullshitted their way to an astonishing degree of news coverage. Probably a majority of local news channels covered it, as did almost all the major newspapers. Like many of you here probably were, I was asked about it by all sorts of nontechnical friends / relatives / strangers who just found out I do software and robotics / etc. I personally am not hoping everyone will forget; I'm hoping they will remember me saying "Oh, no, that's bullshit — it's just a money-losing marketing stunt, not something that they will actually start doing."

butisaidsudo 8y ago

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.

adrianmonk 8y ago

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.)

anonymous5133 8y ago
Probably true. The irony is that many other companies sprang up to actually build real drone delivery companies. There is one in Singapore (can't recall the name) that basically is trying to build drone landing ports (with lockers for storage) on each building in Singapore. The way it works is after you place your order, the drone is dispatched to the locker to make the delivery. The customer goes to the roof of the building where the locker is which then they use a code (sent by sms/e-mail) to open the locker. I thought it was a genius idea. Edit: Looked it up. The company is called airbus with their skyways drone system. It is not related to the aerospace company of the same name.
dbliss 8y ago
As an engineer with Amazon, I can say with 100% (edit: 99.99%) certainty (without any insider knowledge on the drone program), that PR was not the primary driver of this. I would say you have it backwards. Amazon hired engineers to build it (and probably still are) THEN used it as a PR opportunity. To say "The whole thing was always for PR purposes anyway" is a fundamental misunderstanding of how Amazon works internally.
- 8note 8y ago
  More likely, somebody wanted to have fun with drones, then went about trying to sell it to amazon higher ups

zupa-hu 8y ago

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

jcims 8y ago
The article was overly negative IMHO. Guy sounds like a whiner.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

tinkerteller 8y ago

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.

PunchTornado 8y ago

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

kjullien 8y ago

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.

PavlovsCat 8y ago
I never heard of this before, made my day, thanks :) https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zipline+rwanda https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zipline+rwanda http://www.flyzipline.com/ http://www.flyzipline.com/
Jyaif 8y ago
Planes require much more engineering to deal with than quadcopters, but they are way more efficient, and thus the right long term solution.
ThePadawan 8y ago
The landing procedure is really amazing to watch - and I personally find it elegant as in "it solves a difficult problem very easily". Maybe not elegant as in "ballet" or "like the smooth landing of a passenger plane".
walrus01 8y ago
Zipline essentially scaled down and copied Insitu (now Boeing)'s method for landing a ScanEagle drone.

glenrivard 8y ago

"Wing, Alphabet’s drone delivery business, to begin a pilot in Finland in Spring 2019" https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/04/wing-takes-flight-in-finland/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/04/wing-takes-flight-in-finla...

twoodfin 8y ago

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

Dowwie 8y ago

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

slededit 8y ago
Their recruiters used it to show how cool they were - so I don’t think so.

xte 8y ago

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...

8note 8y ago
my apartment in Seattle has a specific drone landing spot
- xte 8y ago
  May I ask how a drone can locate your apartment? Because I can easily imaging to give coordinates of a garden with a precision suitable for a delivery but I can't imaging something that can really work in apartments... Perhaps penthouse apartments, perhaps some new apartments with specially crafted sign to be identified with reasonable safety by the drone but certainly not something that can work at a scale...
- balt_s 8y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=seattle+apartments+with+drone+landing+pad https://www.google.com/search?q=seattle+apartments+with+dron... Sounds dubious.

xkcd-sucks 8y ago

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

rchaud 8y ago

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.

kirykl 8y ago
They’ll equip the drones with military grade defensive avoidance and ground object tracking of course
- rchaud 8y ago
  That'll be reserved for members of Prime Platinum.
jhayward 8y ago
It is illegal to discharge a firearm in almost all incorporated areas in the United States, barring a very unusual emergency need. Almost all drone flights would be, statistically, in these areas. So probably not even worth worrying about as a problem.
- 8note 8y ago
  in Canada up north, people shoot at passing airplanes fairly frequently

robdachshund 8y ago

Hard to take the author seriously when he mentions "the global rise of fascism."