39 ms·

The slow collapse of Amazon’s drone delivery dream

188 points by TigeriusKirk 5y ago

egh 5y ago
Automation can't deliver packages either, lol
- nomel 5y ago
  My naive assumption is that regulations (appropriate or not) is what prevented this from getting off the ground.
  - egh 5y ago
    sure > UK regulators also fast-tracked approvals for drone testing, which made the country an ideal testbed for drone flights and paved the way for Amazon to gain regulatory approval elsewhere.
  - salt-thrower 5y ago
    The only hurdle was that the drones had to be so heavy to handle packages that it put them in a higher weight class subject to more rules. But other than that, the article mentions that the UK and the US regulatory bodies have both approved the project.
    - lijogdfljk 5y ago
      I wonder what the stats were on weight of packages vs required drone weight. Ie where is the cutoff of package weight, to ensure that the money they invest in drones would affect X percent of sales? Eg i imagine if they made drones for a package weight of, say, 10 ounces, they could.. hopefully, make smaller drones and perhaps have an easier time with regulations. However the package size limit is so small that the drones aren't likely worth it. So as we increase package weight, we include more packages and percentage of sales... but also increase drone size and regulatory issues. I imagine there isn't a "sweet spot" otherwise they would have done it. Nevertheless i'm curious what that axis looked like.
    - _rpd 5y ago
      I don't know about the UK, but in the US the FAA required that each drone be operated by a licensed pilot, which changed the economics. There's some talk of autonomous software being granted a pilot's license, so that might shift things again.
  - bperson 5y ago
    It is literally regulations that keep unproven aircraft grounded, yes
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
      Only if they’re uncrewed. Any idiot can legally fly an ultralight experimental aircraft with basically zero oversight. I don’t think you even need a pilot’s license. But God forbid you try to do the same thing without putting a pilot at risk; that’s effectively illegal.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        That makes some amount of sense. If you put the ultralight pilot in the craft, they literally have skin in the game. Further, ultralights cannot be flown over “congested areas” of a town/city. Trying to apply those rules to drone deliveries while ignoring those two pretty fundamental elements doesn’t strike me as evidence that the FAA is being arbitrary or capricious.
      - User23 5y ago
        Idiots flying ultralights are a problem that’s going to self-eliminate quickly.
      - NateEag 5y ago
        Which actually makes sense. When you're risking your own life, you'll likely be at least somewhat careful. When you're just flying an empty test vehicle you'll be much more reckless, and thus way more likely to crash it on other people's property or other people. Hence, much more tightly regulated.
      - jcims 5y ago
        Part 103 aircraft don’t need a license of any sort. There are of course a bunch of regulations about how/when/where you fly it, but you don’t need any official training or certification.
      - JohnFen 5y ago
        > Any idiot can legally fly an ultralight experimental aircraft with basically zero oversight. I don’t think you even need a pilot’s license. But they have limits: No passengers allowed. No flying over towns or settlements. No flying at night or above (or in) the clouds. No flying in airspace around airports with control towers and certain other airspace without prior permission. No commercial operations (for hire) except instruction. Ultralights must yield right-of-way to ALL other aircraft.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    Yup. Zipline in Rwanda and Ghana have made over 150,000 commercial drone deliveries. And have done so safely. (Their autonomous winged drones have a range of over 300km on a charge.) https://www.morningbrew.com/emerging-tech/stories/2021/06/30/imagine-use-teleportation-drone-delivery-unicorn-ziplines-ceo-plans-250-million-funding https://www.morningbrew.com/emerging-tech/stories/2021/06/30... Only token demonstration projects in the US, unfortunately.
    - bluescrn 5y ago
      They've found a niche there where drone deliveries can work and be worthwhile. Getting lightweight but vitally important payloads (medical supplies) quickly to locations hard to access by road. Amazon is in the business of delivering bulky and heavy packages, often of low value and importance, and poorly-but-cheaply packed into oversized cardboard boxes. I can't imagine a very large percentage of Amazon deliveries would be in any way suited to drone delivery, especially when you've got to limit it to destinations with a suitable landing/drop zone, within a certain range of a depot but away from dense urban areas (too high-risk to operate in)
      - maxerickson 5y ago
        Yeah, I live in a relatively rural part of the US and can drive hundreds of pounds of stuff at 60 miles an hour to almost anywhere within a few hundred miles. That doesn't eliminate rapid delivery of small packages as a business model, but it really constrains what is worth shipping using a drone that can carry a couple of pounds.
        Robotbeat 5y ago
        Right. But a lot of Amazon deliveries are single packages, and probably most of them are within the ~4 pound weight limit of current Zipline drones. 80mph, straight-line one-way delivery without requiring a dedicated human driver is pretty effective for rural delivery (and the drones have a range of 300km per charger, currently). But it really is more like Starlink than fiber. It's better suited to underserved rural areas where it's impractical to do single-package delivery. And I think the current ~$15-20/delivery price for Zipline is too high to be terribly practical for most items, but in a rush (and given 24/7 availability), it's absolutely worth it. I can think of many personal instances where a $15-20 delivery charge would easily be worth it to trim hours off of delivery time. I think at this point it's likely safer (i.e. to pedestrians, etc) than delivering the same item via truck. I really do think this has a future, and I'm glad that they've reached a sustainable level of operations in Rwanda and Ghana.
  - neom 5y ago
    My former startup got Jersey City to draft legislation that fully paved the way for delivery drone to operate in the city, they even went as far as to have the FAA clear their draft legislation, basically on the premise that drone companies would take it seriously, talked to Prime Air and they just shrugs and said sorry, not interested.
salt-thrower 5y ago
I doubt many people really want obnoxious drones flying through their neighborhood anyway. I know we already have cars and trucks which are noisy and potentially hazardous, so maybe people would just get used to drones too - but drones are just inherently unsettling at some basic level. I'm not sure why.
- underseacables 5y ago
  I would predict the issue of interference from third party ground lifeforms to be the largest obstacle to over come. Heck, even a kid with a slingshot could do a lot of damage.
  - gruez 5y ago
    Windows seem to do fine, despite being equally being vulnerable to slingshots and being sitting ducks.
    - bigyikes 5y ago
      Windows aren’t despised, though (I love drones)
      - dylan604 5y ago
        Nor is there a challenge to shooting a window. Nor is there potential for getting a "prize" for shooting a window. Playing a game amongst friends with slingshots (or other drone-incapacitaing devices) where the one to disable the drone gets to keep the delivery. Hell, it doesn't even have to be a game played amongst friends.
        sleepybrett 5y ago
        I was out flying with some friends in a spot on an abandoned golf course. Being super respectful of the houses around the edges, flying pretty much in the middle of the course. Some dumbass decided our drones were good skeet targets. The police were very unkind to him and slightly peeved with us... it was a number of years ago.
oh_sigh 5y ago
In a previous role, I worked with one of the leads of the prime air team, a European man whose name is curiously that of a popular Asian food. Anyways, he impressed me 100% as a schmoozer/ladder climber, so I can't say that I'm particularly surprised by the result if he is the kind of person who was running the program for 5+ years. He also (before prime air) led a team of like 4 or 5 very senior(principal+) engineers who basically stole the credit for a certain project that was actually done by my team of 8 mid-level/fresh out of college SDEs
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wheredidtheygo 5y ago
  Do you mean popular Korean food?
908B64B197 5y ago
Step 0 of improving package delivery is to make sure every location has a simple package locker available.
- initplus 5y ago
  Police have run bait car programs, and youtubers have run successful bait package schemes... Don't see why this couldn't be scaled up to a large number of bait packages at pretty low cost... you just need a small GPS tracker embedded in the box.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    Then what does law enforcement will do with the perpetrators? If they don't investigate this [0] will they really go after package thieves? [0] https://youtu.be/arss9V3A1VA?t=95 https://youtu.be/arss9V3A1VA?t=95
- dylan604 5y ago
  I thought you were going to suggest a simple drone landing pad at every location. Plus, you'll need to provide a way for the drone to connect to power for a bit of a recharge. Your Alexa will be able to share wifi with the drone so it can map out its next route while it's charging.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    You are way ahead. Think 3 story apartment building. Where do the packages go? Dedicated locker, lobby, porch, sidewalk?
    - dylan604 5y ago
      For the housing prices in SF,SV,Seattle,NYC, I just assumed they all come with their own helo pads
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
mrinterweb 5y ago
I can't really see any wide-scale drone operation operating in a residential areas. The decibel output of a single delivery drone similar to a delivery van ~70-80 decibels (hard to get comparable decibel output). A delivery truck driver averages around 120 deliveries from one van. A drone can carry one (or maybe a few packages at a time). There would need to be many more round trips for drones meaning far more distance covered by drone. This would require more drones than vans to complete deliveries. Drones sound has a much higher frequency than a van, and to me, drones are more noticeable than the similar decibel output of a van. To be fair, drones have one advantage and that is that they can cover most of the range between the pickup and drop-off points at higher altitudes that would decrease decibels at ground level. Edit: Every 6 decibels sound aptitude doubles so 70-80db is a big difference. Would need to get more reliable and comparable dBA readings.
- _rpd 5y ago
  Workhorse has full on plans for drone delivery that use the van as a base: https://workhorse.com/horsefly.html https://workhorse.com/horsefly.html
- nostrademons 5y ago
  Yeah, I don't see why drones and vans would be mutually exclusve. You drive a van down the main road and have it spin off a fleet of drones for individual residential deliveries. They do their thing in 1-2 minutes - far less time than it would take for the driver to get out of the van and walk the package to the door - and then return to wherever the van is currently driving to recharge and pick up the next delivery. The drones never need more than a 1-2 mile range, they recharge while the van is going to the next neighborhood. You avoid all the congested residential streets, the need to find parking or double-park, the risk of hitting kids that run out into the street to catch their ball, the difficulty finding houses, plus all the hard work drivers need to do to walk up driveways and carry heavy packages. Also is very amenable to self-driving trucks, since the delivery van only needs to navigate the main arteries and they have drones acting as the capillaries.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
slownews45 5y ago
These articles take a pretty short term view to amazon's efforts. They are a global company. Is it possible that the UK regulatory environment was a bit less amendable to drone delivery? What about switching focus to areas with poorer roads / delivery networks etc. Ie, go to africa, go to costa rica, where a drone will be going over trees instead of houses (who will complain?). Do not underestimate how much Amazon spends on shipping alone. I'd guess $50B easily per year. So when we say their delivery dreams have collapsed (even in an area) we need to benchmark against what they are doing / focusing on. Where I am Fedex Home Delivery is TRASH. One week delays easily - sometimes two. Meanwhile Amazon delivers. So they are outcompeting a company focused on delivery. That's a bit crazy? Now let's look at innovation. Amazon are doing lots of weird things that get negative writeups. Their key program where they deliver INTO folks houses (!). Locker deliveries into lockers. Car trunk deliveries. I'm curious if the companies 100% focused on logistics (Fedex / USPS etc) are trying out these ideas? They are going a bit crazy with warehouses and went from 2 day to 1 day to now same day deliveries - https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=21382124011 https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=21382124011 Where I am they deliver till 10PM at night in waves. They seem to have contracted up an airline network for their own package backhaul and consolidation. With billions per year in shipping - I'm not writing them off yet - even their drone program (though maybe it morphs into ground based or other approaches). That said, I do think that the US and UK markets may not LIKE drones flying over houses nonstop even if things are technically possible.
- ElFitz 5y ago
  > Ie, go to africa, go to costa rica, where a drone will be going over trees instead of houses (who will complain?). It’s a funny thing I only realised after spending a couple months in West Africa: Amazon is pretty much non-existent in Africa. They ship only to to more or less a dozen countries there, and a third of those are North-African countries. And I’m not sure it’s a logistical problem. In 2014, less than 15% of West African countries’ populations had a bank account, let alone a credit or debit card. And while mobile money definitely is taking off, cash is still very present and… well, most people probably don’t earn enough to make it worth operating there for Amazon. Just a quick search gave average salaries for Senegal at less than XOF100k (~$180) / month. In Ivory Coast, it would appear to be ~XOF300k. Just looking at the prices on Amazon makes me seriously doubt it would be worth the effort. And that's without even taking into account how different doing business can be in some countries.
aaron695 5y ago
If you write down every step of drone delivery you should see flying drones can't do general delivery. But there is a lot of cool stuff they might do, but you have to be specific, and also write it down using numbers not hand waving. "an employee drinking beer at their desk in the morning" How TF is this news, on Wired. How has the scene become a bunch of accountants and proud. And it seems it was lame anyway - "It was about 11am or 12pm and this guy just had this open can of Stella,” explains one former employee. “He took it out of a fridge and popped it open at his desk.”" Wall Street did coke off hookers in their offices if movies taught me anything. Now we are down to one beer by one employee at 'lunch' shows morale has been destroyed. It is good proof removing lead from gasoline as severely disrupted society, perhaps we should put it back, not 80's wall street level which was problematic but at least something, half the amount of lead.
- _rpd 5y ago
  > How TF is this news, on Wired Wired was always a gossip magazine, but now it is just a gossip magazine. It's sad.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  In SV, most companies consider beer in the fridge to be a common office perk for the past decade. Beer is unusual in American office culture, and you do get sideways glances from people unfamiliar with it (possibly the reason Wired wrote about it.) I think some COO or CFO magazine had an article on it being an affordable and hip perk, so here we are.
TrevorJ 5y ago
It's worth noting that while many of the comments here involve the interesting problem of if drone delivery is viable, the article itself focuses on what appears to be a mismanaged project by Amazon. That is to say, their failure here seems to be separate from the difficulty of the problem space itself.
- neltnerb 5y ago
  Sure, but I mean, I literally always thought this service was a joke. It never even occurred to me that this was a serious project, I thought it was like tacocopter for how silly it was (don't get me wrong, I love tacocopter). If Amazon's leadership did too... limited resources and lack of support make a lot of problems impossible to solve.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  Yes, this is not a technology failure but a top to bottom management failure. Here's a juicy quote: "Another source says their only contact with the central office was an American executive, who would visit every few months, buy the team pizza and then ask them to double their workload" I guess if they were following the infamous Bezos rule, it would have been just one pizza as well. So, yes there are some challenges with drone deliveries; but flying stuff from A to B with an autonomous drone is pretty much a solved problem. Substitute stuff with people and that's going to be a reality soon as well. A couple of autonomous drone manufacturers were showing off their products at the Oskosh air show recently. There are challenges related to non technical issues like certification, where to fly, when to fly, how to price, how to identify suitable places to land and drop the packages, etc. But that should all be solvable.
morpheos137 5y ago
Delivery drones was always ridiculous on its face. I don't know why so many took it seriously. I blame the media miseducating people about what was technically and economically feasible.
Goety 5y ago
They should target employees who live and operate in remote areas like O&G.
gumby 5y ago
Why do deliveries need flying drones? A truckload of wheeled delivery vehicles that could be released each time the truck stops might be more practical in suburban environments (and flying drones don't make as much sense in a skyscraper environment either).
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  There are some domains in which delivery is highly time-sensitive. Food is one canonical example, best illustrated here: https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_... Burritos are particularly robust to delivery (along with Pizza, Chinese takeaway, and curries). Most finer meals, and even items such as sandwiches or hamburgers, aren't. I don't see a large market for duck a l'orange avec quadcopter however. Even food deliveries, though, probably don't pass the sniff test. For me, seeing some new fancy tech prototype or proposal that looks to be unsuited to general commercial or residential use, I tend to see a submarine military application. Drone distribution in a combat environment could conceivably make sense (though it would risk blowing cover in many cases). Emergency response, research, fieldwork, construction, and disaster response are a few other potential fits. Much less price sensitive, high time sensitivity. But mass delivery of random consumer stuff in an urban or suburban environment? Not very likely. I suspect the problem just sounds too cool and is sufficiently engineer-catnippy for anyone to say "no" in time.
  - Leszek 5y ago
    Not that this is very relevant to drones, but I've found over the past ~year that burgers survive being delivered surprisingly well, and the burritos I've gotten have been disappointingly soggy by the time they got to my door.
    - ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
      In Korea McDonalds has a long history of delivery. A typical franchise will have 10 red and yellow electric scooters parked outside. Typical delivery time is 15 min or less.
throwitaway1235 5y ago
I sent AOC a dm on Twitter when she had them open asking how on Earth she doesn't pursue a drone delivery ban, considering how many delivery drivers it would put out of work. No answer.
kilroy123 5y ago
I think drone delivery will find it's niche. The military started testing drone delivery from ship-to-ship [1]. flyzipline has been successfully doing drone delivery in Africa for a while. [2] There's a need a huge role that could be filled. However small drones zipping around your neighborhood dropping off tacos? I don't think so. Not any day soon. [1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41838/drone-makes-first-autonomous-aerial-delivery-between-two-military-vessels https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41838/drone-makes-firs... [2] https://flyzipline.com https://flyzipline.com
- RheingoldRiver 5y ago
  flyzipline is so cool! I saw an AMA they did on reddit a while ago and their tech for the thing landing where it hooks onto the the wire is really neat! https://youtu.be/jEbRVNxL44c?t=284 https://youtu.be/jEbRVNxL44c?t=284
- taneq 5y ago
  As with everything, the buzzkill is regulatory and administrative rather than technical. We could easily make drone delivery a thing but the paperwork will kill it.
  - maweki 5y ago
    Regulating safety and noise are not a buzzkill. They are essential in preventing corporations, like most regulation, from killing people. Tesla's autopilot is the best example that the hurdles are not regulatory in nature, no matter what musk is trying to tell us. As of now, these machines will kill people on the regular. Even in situations that a human could handle. And that's the bar we're setting and I'm glad we do so. Edit: I know that people are killing people on the regular in situations that a machine could handle. And introducing this stuff as safety systems (like autonomous emergency breaking) is not hindered by regulation.
    - xorfish 5y ago
      The main way you reduce traffic fatalities, is by desgining streets and roads in a way that increases safety for all users. One of the most effective ways is to get as many people to use something other than cars for transportation. You do that by making cycling, walking and public transport faster and saver.
fumar 5y ago
Why drones? I’ve been seeing small four wheeled robots old traveling around SoCal sidewalks. These small delivery machines don’t need to fly.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  musk should rebrand his boring stuff as internet of things underground
samdung 5y ago
Can we all allow us the freedom to fail after trying than not having tried at all?
- maweki 5y ago
  For non-food in cities there is no fundamental reason why drones should be any more efficient than ground-based delivery. Flying takes in general more energy than driving and ground-based delivery is not more dangerous or much more expensive.
  - mft_ 5y ago
    Energy could be disregarded as (with renewable sourcing) it would be essentially free in the amounts needed for drones. Drones would offer increased speed of delivery within boundaries, plus scaling without the tricky problem (for Amazon it seems!) of directly employing more humans. (Obvs humans needed behind the scenes.)
    - unionpivo 5y ago
      Energy will not be free for quite a while, if ever. And while energy for a single flight of a single drone is minimal, having tens of thousand of delivery drones, operating 24/7 (or 16 hrs a day) is another matter. Even if cost of production of energy is 0 (and it's not. even for renewable, solar panels need cleaning and occasional replacement, wind turbines need regular maintenance, etc.), there is a large cost of maintaining electric grid. In some places on earth, local solar installations, might be enough, but for most of the planet, we will still need normal grid, and probably even expand them, if we plan to migrate everything to green electricity. I don't know how much electricity you pay where you live, but for me, only around 50% of the bill is actual usage. And since other forms of energy(like gasoline and natural gas) provide significant tax income, this will eventually mean governments will raise electric taxes to compensate, when and if electricity replaces them. So I would not be surprised if cost of electricity stayed the same.
willvarfar 5y ago
I’m surprised there isn’t a startup doing ballistic delivery. Puts all the heavy components in the end that doesn’t leave the ground and gets reused.
- vasco 5y ago
  Looking forward to having Bezos shooting missiles around my city
- tdeck 5y ago
  Ballistic delivery would likely be unpredictable due to changes in the wind, which could result in dangerous or destructive accidents. I suppose there could be some ballistic projectile with a low-power guidance system.
- rudian 5y ago
  There's an American company[1] in Ghana sending medical supplies around the country with small launchable planes.[2] 1: https://flyzipline.com https://flyzipline.com 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c
  - mkl 5y ago
    That's not at all ballistic though.
  - tsjq 5y ago
    that was an amazing watch. thanks for sharing the links. !
- mrtksn 5y ago
  I recall reading about narcos doing ballistic delivery over the border.
- varjag 5y ago
  There's SpaceX https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/04/us-military-rocket-cargo-program-for-spacexs-starship-and-others.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/04/us-military-rocket-cargo-pro...
hef19898 5y ago
I think this is the first time Amazon made people redundant after they ramped down a project. Not that people aren't leaving after that, but being made redundant? Usually people either leave "voluntarily" or go to ther functions within the company. Not sure what to make of that, IMHO that's untypical for Amazon.
- kettleballroll 5y ago
  It sounds like the people that are being made redundant were mainly tasked with labeling data (which also matches them being temps instead of full time employees, and them training replacements in Costa Rica), so I don't think they're software engineers that can easily switch to other teams.
kumarski 5y ago
Drone delivery will never be economically competitive with other sources of transport based on the materials energy balance woes of lithium ion batteries or even lithium ion phosphate batteries. The Lithium LCOE(which is already a perturbed metric) is several times that of other sources of energy which makes the whole economic action moot.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  I also imagine buccaneering teams hunting drones for their batteries and cargo. It will be a poetic justice: after years of mislabelling copyright infringement as 'piracy', Amazon will get a taste of real piracy.
- netjiro 5y ago
  Delivery drones are constructed for fairly narrow usage scenarios, and will get more specialised with time. For short hops with light loads air drones are already better than traditional solutions if they are allowed to be used as intended. Air drones span orders of magnitude in cargo capacity, speed, distance. Drone ships, drone cars, ... Don't use a hammer to drive a screw.
c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago
I worked for a drone start-up that focused on a drone in a box / dedicated landing pad type solution. Seeing the big names and well funded competitors not succeed validated the technical and regulatory challenges for me. The biggest technical challenge by far was getting the drone to land back in the box reliably over 10's,100's,1000's of attempts. Other annoying issues included buggy open source flight controller firmware, motor bearings only rated for 50 hours of flight (industry has since improved), and attempting to recharge batteries in hot ambient temperatures.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  I always thought the biggest impediment to drove dileveries would be a shotgun blast in certain parts of the country. I guess multiple cams, and very quiet drones, would solve the problem. I'm actually for drones. The sound of delivery vans delivering one package seems wasteful? Unless you are the driver?
  - GravitasFailure 5y ago
    Oh, there's no shortage of possible hazards for drones. Ever see a hawk take one down?
  - SahAssar 5y ago
    If the cameras are streaming back video that would be a very easy legal case against the person shooting. I'm guessing after it happens a few times and people see the repercussions they would stop.
    - imwillofficial 5y ago
      Or a a legal case FOR the person shooting. Having a floating spy cam in my yard is shotgun worthy.
rishikeshs 5y ago
How practical was the idea? Anybody thinks this is the future?
- JohnFen 5y ago
  I think drone delivery is the future for certain narrow use cases. I don't think it's the future for common delivery in towns/cities, at least unless someone can figure out how to make them quiet enough so that people don't get mad. No matter what the FAA says about it, cities and towns have the authority to disallow them, and if the townsfolk are mad enough, they will.
Clewza313 5y ago
> “The best living metaphor for it all is that you had some bloke on the other side of the planet telling you what to do and then just leaving,” the source claims. This is commonly known as seagull management: fly in, squawk a lot, shit over everything, and then fly off.
- contingencies 5y ago
  Nice one. Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
- 7373737373 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_management https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_management 'keep them in the dark and cover them with manure"
- rkuykendall-com 5y ago
  > “The best living metaphor for it all is that you had some bloke on the other side of the planet telling you what to do and then just leaving,” the source claims. Some poetic irony to this happening to the UK.
- cybert00th 5y ago
  I've heard it called drive-by management - same thing, different smell.
- ogn3rd 5y ago
  Describes my previous AWS manager perfectly.
mytailorisrich 5y ago
Drone delivery looks cool and does have real potential in some cases. But when looking at 'standard' deliveries in residential areas drones don't look practical or attractive at all.
jacquesm 5y ago
Think of Amazon's drone delivery program the same way as you would about Blue Origin: an extension of the PR machine, not something that is meant to move the needle in a practical way.
alephnan 5y ago
> an employee drinking beer at their desk in the morning What’s wrong with that ?
DoubleGlazing 5y ago
I know a few people involved in drone delivery projects. Their employers are always just about to launch commercial services, and it has been that way for several years. There was to be a big trial of food deliveries within a university campus, but the local aviation regulator stopped it from happening due to a load of unresolved safety issues. The problem is that drone delivery in urban areas is difficult. Accurate landing issues, noise, kids throwing stones at them, overhead wiring, managing safe landing when there's a fault etc. Oh and the big one, air traffic control. The authorities want drone operators to co-ordinate their flights so that they don't crash in to each other. The clients of the drone operators are obsessed with commercial confidentiality and don't want that to happen. I'm in Ireland the only type of drone delivery that seems to be successful so far is delivering medicines and the like to small islands off the west coast where most of the above issues don't apply. It seems to me that drone delivery will end up being a niche thing. Ground based robot delivery systems will probably succeed where drones fail.
JohnFen 5y ago
Oh, we can but hope. I was not looking forward to having to put up with the sounds of drones flying around the neighborhood.

188 points by TigeriusKirk 5y ago

egh 5y ago

Automation can't deliver packages either, lol

nomel 5y ago
My naive assumption is that regulations (appropriate or not) is what prevented this from getting off the ground.
- egh 5y ago
  sure > UK regulators also fast-tracked approvals for drone testing, which made the country an ideal testbed for drone flights and paved the way for Amazon to gain regulatory approval elsewhere.
- salt-thrower 5y ago
  The only hurdle was that the drones had to be so heavy to handle packages that it put them in a higher weight class subject to more rules. But other than that, the article mentions that the UK and the US regulatory bodies have both approved the project.
  - lijogdfljk 5y ago
    I wonder what the stats were on weight of packages vs required drone weight. Ie where is the cutoff of package weight, to ensure that the money they invest in drones would affect X percent of sales? Eg i imagine if they made drones for a package weight of, say, 10 ounces, they could.. hopefully, make smaller drones and perhaps have an easier time with regulations. However the package size limit is so small that the drones aren't likely worth it. So as we increase package weight, we include more packages and percentage of sales... but also increase drone size and regulatory issues. I imagine there isn't a "sweet spot" otherwise they would have done it. Nevertheless i'm curious what that axis looked like.
  - _rpd 5y ago
    I don't know about the UK, but in the US the FAA required that each drone be operated by a licensed pilot, which changed the economics. There's some talk of autonomous software being granted a pilot's license, so that might shift things again.
- bperson 5y ago
  It is literally regulations that keep unproven aircraft grounded, yes
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    Only if they’re uncrewed. Any idiot can legally fly an ultralight experimental aircraft with basically zero oversight. I don’t think you even need a pilot’s license. But God forbid you try to do the same thing without putting a pilot at risk; that’s effectively illegal.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      That makes some amount of sense. If you put the ultralight pilot in the craft, they literally have skin in the game. Further, ultralights cannot be flown over “congested areas” of a town/city. Trying to apply those rules to drone deliveries while ignoring those two pretty fundamental elements doesn’t strike me as evidence that the FAA is being arbitrary or capricious.
    - User23 5y ago
      Idiots flying ultralights are a problem that’s going to self-eliminate quickly.
    - NateEag 5y ago
      Which actually makes sense. When you're risking your own life, you'll likely be at least somewhat careful. When you're just flying an empty test vehicle you'll be much more reckless, and thus way more likely to crash it on other people's property or other people. Hence, much more tightly regulated.
    - jcims 5y ago
      Part 103 aircraft don’t need a license of any sort. There are of course a bunch of regulations about how/when/where you fly it, but you don’t need any official training or certification.
    - JohnFen 5y ago
      > Any idiot can legally fly an ultralight experimental aircraft with basically zero oversight. I don’t think you even need a pilot’s license. But they have limits: No passengers allowed. No flying over towns or settlements. No flying at night or above (or in) the clouds. No flying in airspace around airports with control towers and certain other airspace without prior permission. No commercial operations (for hire) except instruction. Ultralights must yield right-of-way to ALL other aircraft.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Yup. Zipline in Rwanda and Ghana have made over 150,000 commercial drone deliveries. And have done so safely. (Their autonomous winged drones have a range of over 300km on a charge.) https://www.morningbrew.com/emerging-tech/stories/2021/06/30/imagine-use-teleportation-drone-delivery-unicorn-ziplines-ceo-plans-250-million-funding https://www.morningbrew.com/emerging-tech/stories/2021/06/30... Only token demonstration projects in the US, unfortunately.
  - bluescrn 5y ago
    They've found a niche there where drone deliveries can work and be worthwhile. Getting lightweight but vitally important payloads (medical supplies) quickly to locations hard to access by road. Amazon is in the business of delivering bulky and heavy packages, often of low value and importance, and poorly-but-cheaply packed into oversized cardboard boxes. I can't imagine a very large percentage of Amazon deliveries would be in any way suited to drone delivery, especially when you've got to limit it to destinations with a suitable landing/drop zone, within a certain range of a depot but away from dense urban areas (too high-risk to operate in)
    - maxerickson 5y ago
      Yeah, I live in a relatively rural part of the US and can drive hundreds of pounds of stuff at 60 miles an hour to almost anywhere within a few hundred miles. That doesn't eliminate rapid delivery of small packages as a business model, but it really constrains what is worth shipping using a drone that can carry a couple of pounds.
      - Robotbeat 5y ago
        Right. But a lot of Amazon deliveries are single packages, and probably most of them are within the ~4 pound weight limit of current Zipline drones. 80mph, straight-line one-way delivery without requiring a dedicated human driver is pretty effective for rural delivery (and the drones have a range of 300km per charger, currently). But it really is more like Starlink than fiber. It's better suited to underserved rural areas where it's impractical to do single-package delivery. And I think the current ~$15-20/delivery price for Zipline is too high to be terribly practical for most items, but in a rush (and given 24/7 availability), it's absolutely worth it. I can think of many personal instances where a $15-20 delivery charge would easily be worth it to trim hours off of delivery time. I think at this point it's likely safer (i.e. to pedestrians, etc) than delivering the same item via truck. I really do think this has a future, and I'm glad that they've reached a sustainable level of operations in Rwanda and Ghana.
- neom 5y ago
  My former startup got Jersey City to draft legislation that fully paved the way for delivery drone to operate in the city, they even went as far as to have the FAA clear their draft legislation, basically on the premise that drone companies would take it seriously, talked to Prime Air and they just shrugs and said sorry, not interested.

salt-thrower 5y ago

I doubt many people really want obnoxious drones flying through their neighborhood anyway. I know we already have cars and trucks which are noisy and potentially hazardous, so maybe people would just get used to drones too - but drones are just inherently unsettling at some basic level. I'm not sure why.

underseacables 5y ago
I would predict the issue of interference from third party ground lifeforms to be the largest obstacle to over come. Heck, even a kid with a slingshot could do a lot of damage.
- gruez 5y ago
  Windows seem to do fine, despite being equally being vulnerable to slingshots and being sitting ducks.
  - bigyikes 5y ago
    Windows aren’t despised, though (I love drones)
    - dylan604 5y ago
      Nor is there a challenge to shooting a window. Nor is there potential for getting a "prize" for shooting a window. Playing a game amongst friends with slingshots (or other drone-incapacitaing devices) where the one to disable the drone gets to keep the delivery. Hell, it doesn't even have to be a game played amongst friends.
      - sleepybrett 5y ago
        I was out flying with some friends in a spot on an abandoned golf course. Being super respectful of the houses around the edges, flying pretty much in the middle of the course. Some dumbass decided our drones were good skeet targets. The police were very unkind to him and slightly peeved with us... it was a number of years ago.

oh_sigh 5y ago

In a previous role, I worked with one of the leads of the prime air team, a European man whose name is curiously that of a popular Asian food. Anyways, he impressed me 100% as a schmoozer/ladder climber, so I can't say that I'm particularly surprised by the result if he is the kind of person who was running the program for 5+ years. He also (before prime air) led a team of like 4 or 5 very senior(principal+) engineers who basically stole the credit for a certain project that was actually done by my team of 8 mid-level/fresh out of college SDEs

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wheredidtheygo 5y ago
Do you mean popular Korean food?

908B64B197 5y ago

Step 0 of improving package delivery is to make sure every location has a simple package locker available.

initplus 5y ago
Police have run bait car programs, and youtubers have run successful bait package schemes... Don't see why this couldn't be scaled up to a large number of bait packages at pretty low cost... you just need a small GPS tracker embedded in the box.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  Then what does law enforcement will do with the perpetrators? If they don't investigate this [0] will they really go after package thieves? [0] https://youtu.be/arss9V3A1VA?t=95 https://youtu.be/arss9V3A1VA?t=95
dylan604 5y ago
I thought you were going to suggest a simple drone landing pad at every location. Plus, you'll need to provide a way for the drone to connect to power for a bit of a recharge. Your Alexa will be able to share wifi with the drone so it can map out its next route while it's charging.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  You are way ahead. Think 3 story apartment building. Where do the packages go? Dedicated locker, lobby, porch, sidewalk?
  - dylan604 5y ago
    For the housing prices in SF,SV,Seattle,NYC, I just assumed they all come with their own helo pads
    - dredmorbius 5y ago

mrinterweb 5y ago

I can't really see any wide-scale drone operation operating in a residential areas. The decibel output of a single delivery drone similar to a delivery van ~70-80 decibels (hard to get comparable decibel output). A delivery truck driver averages around 120 deliveries from one van. A drone can carry one (or maybe a few packages at a time). There would need to be many more round trips for drones meaning far more distance covered by drone. This would require more drones than vans to complete deliveries. Drones sound has a much higher frequency than a van, and to me, drones are more noticeable than the similar decibel output of a van. To be fair, drones have one advantage and that is that they can cover most of the range between the pickup and drop-off points at higher altitudes that would decrease decibels at ground level. Edit: Every 6 decibels sound aptitude doubles so 70-80db is a big difference. Would need to get more reliable and comparable dBA readings.

_rpd 5y ago
Workhorse has full on plans for drone delivery that use the van as a base: https://workhorse.com/horsefly.html https://workhorse.com/horsefly.html
nostrademons 5y ago
Yeah, I don't see why drones and vans would be mutually exclusve. You drive a van down the main road and have it spin off a fleet of drones for individual residential deliveries. They do their thing in 1-2 minutes - far less time than it would take for the driver to get out of the van and walk the package to the door - and then return to wherever the van is currently driving to recharge and pick up the next delivery. The drones never need more than a 1-2 mile range, they recharge while the van is going to the next neighborhood. You avoid all the congested residential streets, the need to find parking or double-park, the risk of hitting kids that run out into the street to catch their ball, the difficulty finding houses, plus all the hard work drivers need to do to walk up driveways and carry heavy packages. Also is very amenable to self-driving trucks, since the delivery van only needs to navigate the main arteries and they have drones acting as the capillaries.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

slownews45 5y ago

These articles take a pretty short term view to amazon's efforts. They are a global company. Is it possible that the UK regulatory environment was a bit less amendable to drone delivery? What about switching focus to areas with poorer roads / delivery networks etc. Ie, go to africa, go to costa rica, where a drone will be going over trees instead of houses (who will complain?). Do not underestimate how much Amazon spends on shipping alone. I'd guess $50B easily per year. So when we say their delivery dreams have collapsed (even in an area) we need to benchmark against what they are doing / focusing on. Where I am Fedex Home Delivery is TRASH. One week delays easily - sometimes two. Meanwhile Amazon delivers. So they are outcompeting a company focused on delivery. That's a bit crazy? Now let's look at innovation. Amazon are doing lots of weird things that get negative writeups. Their key program where they deliver INTO folks houses (!). Locker deliveries into lockers. Car trunk deliveries. I'm curious if the companies 100% focused on logistics (Fedex / USPS etc) are trying out these ideas? They are going a bit crazy with warehouses and went from 2 day to 1 day to now same day deliveries - https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=21382124011 https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=21382124011 Where I am they deliver till 10PM at night in waves. They seem to have contracted up an airline network for their own package backhaul and consolidation. With billions per year in shipping - I'm not writing them off yet - even their drone program (though maybe it morphs into ground based or other approaches). That said, I do think that the US and UK markets may not LIKE drones flying over houses nonstop even if things are technically possible.

ElFitz 5y ago
> Ie, go to africa, go to costa rica, where a drone will be going over trees instead of houses (who will complain?). It’s a funny thing I only realised after spending a couple months in West Africa: Amazon is pretty much non-existent in Africa. They ship only to to more or less a dozen countries there, and a third of those are North-African countries. And I’m not sure it’s a logistical problem. In 2014, less than 15% of West African countries’ populations had a bank account, let alone a credit or debit card. And while mobile money definitely is taking off, cash is still very present and… well, most people probably don’t earn enough to make it worth operating there for Amazon. Just a quick search gave average salaries for Senegal at less than XOF100k (~$180) / month. In Ivory Coast, it would appear to be ~XOF300k. Just looking at the prices on Amazon makes me seriously doubt it would be worth the effort. And that's without even taking into account how different doing business can be in some countries.

aaron695 5y ago

If you write down every step of drone delivery you should see flying drones can't do general delivery. But there is a lot of cool stuff they might do, but you have to be specific, and also write it down using numbers not hand waving. "an employee drinking beer at their desk in the morning" How TF is this news, on Wired. How has the scene become a bunch of accountants and proud. And it seems it was lame anyway - "It was about 11am or 12pm and this guy just had this open can of Stella,” explains one former employee. “He took it out of a fridge and popped it open at his desk.”" Wall Street did coke off hookers in their offices if movies taught me anything. Now we are down to one beer by one employee at 'lunch' shows morale has been destroyed. It is good proof removing lead from gasoline as severely disrupted society, perhaps we should put it back, not 80's wall street level which was problematic but at least something, half the amount of lead.

_rpd 5y ago
> How TF is this news, on Wired Wired was always a gossip magazine, but now it is just a gossip magazine. It's sad.
redis_mlc 5y ago
In SV, most companies consider beer in the fridge to be a common office perk for the past decade. Beer is unusual in American office culture, and you do get sideways glances from people unfamiliar with it (possibly the reason Wired wrote about it.) I think some COO or CFO magazine had an article on it being an affordable and hip perk, so here we are.

TrevorJ 5y ago

It's worth noting that while many of the comments here involve the interesting problem of if drone delivery is viable, the article itself focuses on what appears to be a mismanaged project by Amazon. That is to say, their failure here seems to be separate from the difficulty of the problem space itself.

neltnerb 5y ago
Sure, but I mean, I literally always thought this service was a joke. It never even occurred to me that this was a serious project, I thought it was like tacocopter for how silly it was (don't get me wrong, I love tacocopter). If Amazon's leadership did too... limited resources and lack of support make a lot of problems impossible to solve.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
Yes, this is not a technology failure but a top to bottom management failure. Here's a juicy quote: "Another source says their only contact with the central office was an American executive, who would visit every few months, buy the team pizza and then ask them to double their workload" I guess if they were following the infamous Bezos rule, it would have been just one pizza as well. So, yes there are some challenges with drone deliveries; but flying stuff from A to B with an autonomous drone is pretty much a solved problem. Substitute stuff with people and that's going to be a reality soon as well. A couple of autonomous drone manufacturers were showing off their products at the Oskosh air show recently. There are challenges related to non technical issues like certification, where to fly, when to fly, how to price, how to identify suitable places to land and drop the packages, etc. But that should all be solvable.

morpheos137 5y ago

Delivery drones was always ridiculous on its face. I don't know why so many took it seriously. I blame the media miseducating people about what was technically and economically feasible.

Goety 5y ago

They should target employees who live and operate in remote areas like O&G.

gumby 5y ago

Why do deliveries need flying drones? A truckload of wheeled delivery vehicles that could be released each time the truck stops might be more practical in suburban environments (and flying drones don't make as much sense in a skyscraper environment either).

dredmorbius 5y ago
There are some domains in which delivery is highly time-sensitive. Food is one canonical example, best illustrated here: https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_... Burritos are particularly robust to delivery (along with Pizza, Chinese takeaway, and curries). Most finer meals, and even items such as sandwiches or hamburgers, aren't. I don't see a large market for duck a l'orange avec quadcopter however. Even food deliveries, though, probably don't pass the sniff test. For me, seeing some new fancy tech prototype or proposal that looks to be unsuited to general commercial or residential use, I tend to see a submarine military application. Drone distribution in a combat environment could conceivably make sense (though it would risk blowing cover in many cases). Emergency response, research, fieldwork, construction, and disaster response are a few other potential fits. Much less price sensitive, high time sensitivity. But mass delivery of random consumer stuff in an urban or suburban environment? Not very likely. I suspect the problem just sounds too cool and is sufficiently engineer-catnippy for anyone to say "no" in time.
- Leszek 5y ago
  Not that this is very relevant to drones, but I've found over the past ~year that burgers survive being delivered surprisingly well, and the burritos I've gotten have been disappointingly soggy by the time they got to my door.
  - ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
    In Korea McDonalds has a long history of delivery. A typical franchise will have 10 red and yellow electric scooters parked outside. Typical delivery time is 15 min or less.

throwitaway1235 5y ago

I sent AOC a dm on Twitter when she had them open asking how on Earth she doesn't pursue a drone delivery ban, considering how many delivery drivers it would put out of work. No answer.

kilroy123 5y ago

I think drone delivery will find it's niche. The military started testing drone delivery from ship-to-ship [1]. flyzipline has been successfully doing drone delivery in Africa for a while. [2] There's a need a huge role that could be filled. However small drones zipping around your neighborhood dropping off tacos? I don't think so. Not any day soon. [1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41838/drone-makes-first-autonomous-aerial-delivery-between-two-military-vessels https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41838/drone-makes-firs... [2] https://flyzipline.com https://flyzipline.com

RheingoldRiver 5y ago
flyzipline is so cool! I saw an AMA they did on reddit a while ago and their tech for the thing landing where it hooks onto the the wire is really neat! https://youtu.be/jEbRVNxL44c?t=284 https://youtu.be/jEbRVNxL44c?t=284
taneq 5y ago
As with everything, the buzzkill is regulatory and administrative rather than technical. We could easily make drone delivery a thing but the paperwork will kill it.
- maweki 5y ago
  Regulating safety and noise are not a buzzkill. They are essential in preventing corporations, like most regulation, from killing people. Tesla's autopilot is the best example that the hurdles are not regulatory in nature, no matter what musk is trying to tell us. As of now, these machines will kill people on the regular. Even in situations that a human could handle. And that's the bar we're setting and I'm glad we do so. Edit: I know that people are killing people on the regular in situations that a machine could handle. And introducing this stuff as safety systems (like autonomous emergency breaking) is not hindered by regulation.
  - xorfish 5y ago
    The main way you reduce traffic fatalities, is by desgining streets and roads in a way that increases safety for all users. One of the most effective ways is to get as many people to use something other than cars for transportation. You do that by making cycling, walking and public transport faster and saver.

fumar 5y ago

Why drones? I’ve been seeing small four wheeled robots old traveling around SoCal sidewalks. These small delivery machines don’t need to fly.

agumonkey 5y ago
musk should rebrand his boring stuff as internet of things underground

samdung 5y ago

Can we all allow us the freedom to fail after trying than not having tried at all?

maweki 5y ago
For non-food in cities there is no fundamental reason why drones should be any more efficient than ground-based delivery. Flying takes in general more energy than driving and ground-based delivery is not more dangerous or much more expensive.
- mft_ 5y ago
  Energy could be disregarded as (with renewable sourcing) it would be essentially free in the amounts needed for drones. Drones would offer increased speed of delivery within boundaries, plus scaling without the tricky problem (for Amazon it seems!) of directly employing more humans. (Obvs humans needed behind the scenes.)
  - unionpivo 5y ago
    Energy will not be free for quite a while, if ever. And while energy for a single flight of a single drone is minimal, having tens of thousand of delivery drones, operating 24/7 (or 16 hrs a day) is another matter. Even if cost of production of energy is 0 (and it's not. even for renewable, solar panels need cleaning and occasional replacement, wind turbines need regular maintenance, etc.), there is a large cost of maintaining electric grid. In some places on earth, local solar installations, might be enough, but for most of the planet, we will still need normal grid, and probably even expand them, if we plan to migrate everything to green electricity. I don't know how much electricity you pay where you live, but for me, only around 50% of the bill is actual usage. And since other forms of energy(like gasoline and natural gas) provide significant tax income, this will eventually mean governments will raise electric taxes to compensate, when and if electricity replaces them. So I would not be surprised if cost of electricity stayed the same.

willvarfar 5y ago

I’m surprised there isn’t a startup doing ballistic delivery. Puts all the heavy components in the end that doesn’t leave the ground and gets reused.

vasco 5y ago
Looking forward to having Bezos shooting missiles around my city
tdeck 5y ago
Ballistic delivery would likely be unpredictable due to changes in the wind, which could result in dangerous or destructive accidents. I suppose there could be some ballistic projectile with a low-power guidance system.
rudian 5y ago
There's an American company[1] in Ghana sending medical supplies around the country with small launchable planes.[2] 1: https://flyzipline.com https://flyzipline.com 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c
- mkl 5y ago
  That's not at all ballistic though.
- tsjq 5y ago
  that was an amazing watch. thanks for sharing the links. !
mrtksn 5y ago
I recall reading about narcos doing ballistic delivery over the border.
varjag 5y ago
There's SpaceX https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/04/us-military-rocket-cargo-program-for-spacexs-starship-and-others.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/04/us-military-rocket-cargo-pro...

hef19898 5y ago

I think this is the first time Amazon made people redundant after they ramped down a project. Not that people aren't leaving after that, but being made redundant? Usually people either leave "voluntarily" or go to ther functions within the company. Not sure what to make of that, IMHO that's untypical for Amazon.

kettleballroll 5y ago
It sounds like the people that are being made redundant were mainly tasked with labeling data (which also matches them being temps instead of full time employees, and them training replacements in Costa Rica), so I don't think they're software engineers that can easily switch to other teams.

kumarski 5y ago

Drone delivery will never be economically competitive with other sources of transport based on the materials energy balance woes of lithium ion batteries or even lithium ion phosphate batteries. The Lithium LCOE(which is already a perturbed metric) is several times that of other sources of energy which makes the whole economic action moot.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
I also imagine buccaneering teams hunting drones for their batteries and cargo. It will be a poetic justice: after years of mislabelling copyright infringement as 'piracy', Amazon will get a taste of real piracy.
netjiro 5y ago
Delivery drones are constructed for fairly narrow usage scenarios, and will get more specialised with time. For short hops with light loads air drones are already better than traditional solutions if they are allowed to be used as intended. Air drones span orders of magnitude in cargo capacity, speed, distance. Drone ships, drone cars, ... Don't use a hammer to drive a screw.

c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago

I worked for a drone start-up that focused on a drone in a box / dedicated landing pad type solution. Seeing the big names and well funded competitors not succeed validated the technical and regulatory challenges for me. The biggest technical challenge by far was getting the drone to land back in the box reliably over 10's,100's,1000's of attempts. Other annoying issues included buggy open source flight controller firmware, motor bearings only rated for 50 hours of flight (industry has since improved), and attempting to recharge batteries in hot ambient temperatures.

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hellbannedguy 5y ago
I always thought the biggest impediment to drove dileveries would be a shotgun blast in certain parts of the country. I guess multiple cams, and very quiet drones, would solve the problem. I'm actually for drones. The sound of delivery vans delivering one package seems wasteful? Unless you are the driver?
- GravitasFailure 5y ago
  Oh, there's no shortage of possible hazards for drones. Ever see a hawk take one down?
- SahAssar 5y ago
  If the cameras are streaming back video that would be a very easy legal case against the person shooting. I'm guessing after it happens a few times and people see the repercussions they would stop.
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    Or a a legal case FOR the person shooting. Having a floating spy cam in my yard is shotgun worthy.

rishikeshs 5y ago

How practical was the idea? Anybody thinks this is the future?

JohnFen 5y ago
I think drone delivery is the future for certain narrow use cases. I don't think it's the future for common delivery in towns/cities, at least unless someone can figure out how to make them quiet enough so that people don't get mad. No matter what the FAA says about it, cities and towns have the authority to disallow them, and if the townsfolk are mad enough, they will.

Clewza313 5y ago

> “The best living metaphor for it all is that you had some bloke on the other side of the planet telling you what to do and then just leaving,” the source claims. This is commonly known as seagull management: fly in, squawk a lot, shit over everything, and then fly off.

contingencies 5y ago
Nice one. Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
7373737373 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_management https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_management 'keep them in the dark and cover them with manure"
rkuykendall-com 5y ago
> “The best living metaphor for it all is that you had some bloke on the other side of the planet telling you what to do and then just leaving,” the source claims. Some poetic irony to this happening to the UK.
cybert00th 5y ago
I've heard it called drive-by management - same thing, different smell.
ogn3rd 5y ago
Describes my previous AWS manager perfectly.

mytailorisrich 5y ago

Drone delivery looks cool and does have real potential in some cases. But when looking at 'standard' deliveries in residential areas drones don't look practical or attractive at all.

jacquesm 5y ago

Think of Amazon's drone delivery program the same way as you would about Blue Origin: an extension of the PR machine, not something that is meant to move the needle in a practical way.

alephnan 5y ago

> an employee drinking beer at their desk in the morning What’s wrong with that ?

DoubleGlazing 5y ago

I know a few people involved in drone delivery projects. Their employers are always just about to launch commercial services, and it has been that way for several years. There was to be a big trial of food deliveries within a university campus, but the local aviation regulator stopped it from happening due to a load of unresolved safety issues. The problem is that drone delivery in urban areas is difficult. Accurate landing issues, noise, kids throwing stones at them, overhead wiring, managing safe landing when there's a fault etc. Oh and the big one, air traffic control. The authorities want drone operators to co-ordinate their flights so that they don't crash in to each other. The clients of the drone operators are obsessed with commercial confidentiality and don't want that to happen. I'm in Ireland the only type of drone delivery that seems to be successful so far is delivering medicines and the like to small islands off the west coast where most of the above issues don't apply. It seems to me that drone delivery will end up being a niche thing. Ground based robot delivery systems will probably succeed where drones fail.

JohnFen 5y ago

Oh, we can but hope. I was not looking forward to having to put up with the sounds of drones flying around the neighborhood.