Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can’t weigh more than 5 pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can’t fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy.
You need to be home to put out the landing target and to make sure that a porch pirate doesn’t make off with your item or that it doesn’t roll into the street (which happened once to Lord and Silverman). But your car can’t be in the driveway. Letting the drone land in the backyard would avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees.
Amazon has also warned customers that drone delivery is unavailable during periods of high demand for drone delivery.
Noise is absolutely a concern for flying things. The reasons we don’t yet have flying cars is not because they’re too expensive, but because they’re too loud. And this is specifically why the FAA won’t let me commute to work in an ultralight.
The police want Bladerunner spinners so bad they can taste it. And the reason they can’t have them — or more helicopters — is the noise.
The reasons we don’t yet have flying cars is not because they’re too expensive, but because they’re too loud
I’m sure being too loud is an issue, but it’s not the issue. That’s like saying the reason we don’t all have castles is due to municipal zoning laws. Sure, that would make having a castle harder, but it’s not the issue.
Yes, “flying cars” are loud, but that’s a minor issue compared to the other ones. They’re expensive to operate. They’re dangerous both to their passengers and to people on the ground. They’re extremely expensive. The infrastructure isn’t available. They’d require training to operate, etc.
If you could wave a magic wand and make all those other problems disappear, the noise issue would still be a blocker. But, the noise issue isn’t the biggest current blocker.
We have flying cars, they are called airplanes or more specifically civil utility aircraft. You know, like the Cessna 172.
Flying vehicles aren’t more mainstream because of the cost. A new plane can cost over half a million dollars while a used plane can easily be over a hundred thousand dollars. And that’s just the cost of the plane.
The other reason is because the rules are more strict and are actually enforced. If a pilot flew their plane like the average person drives their car they would be sitting in jail await trail for attempt murder.
We have flying cars, they are called airplanes
I think you’re missing the cars part of flying cars.
Like, the dream isn’t to drive your car to the airport and get into an airplane. The “car” part of flying cars is about having one in your driveway.
A new plane can cost over half a million dollars while a used plane can easily be over a hundred thousand dollars
You can get a used Cessna for under $60k:
But, the issue isn’t the up-front cost. Because a plane isn’t a flying car, you have to store it somewhere, and that isn’t cheap. Even just tying it down outdoors can be more than $150/month. Then there are the operating costs, which are much higher than cars: insurance, annual inspections, fuel, maintenance, etc.
The Webster dictionary defines a car as a vehicle that moves on wheels which airplanes definitely are.
If you’re having to resort to the dictionary definition, you know you’re flailing.
The idea behind a flying car is that everyone could have one in their driveway (not the rare people who live in fly-in communities) and that they can use a combination of driving and flying to get places. That’s what all the flying-car companies are working towards, that’s what people dream of having. Having to live right next to an airport, or having to drive their car to the airport to get their plane isn’t the “flying car” dream.
That’s not the only reason why flying cars haven’t arrived. Getting a license to fly is about the price of a new car. Bad weather is no flying. Air Traffic Control can’t handle thousands of commuters. Flying cars are pretty big so parking is going to be even more of an issue.
Also, imagine drunk flyers in bad weather.
Ground traffic collisions can also cause collateral damage, but more often than not those are constrained to the roads or their immediate vicinity where not many people live. An aerial collision may happen above residential areas, and even slight fender benders may mean a double crash (…on little Timmy mowing the lawn).
Also, there’s no air bag in the world that can save you in a crash.
Road traffic is easy to direct and regulate with road signs, lanes, lights, painted lines. Good luck herding cats a hundred (hundreds of) yards above ground. It’s not a huge problem with planes because there are not as many of them and they fly at vastly different altitudes. Not the case with personal flying cars.
With ground traffic, you only need two blinkers (or two sets). Some drivers even struggle with using that two properly. Good luck for getting them to use more.
And that’s just the top of my head, I’m sure there are like 2634 other reasons.
Also, imagine drunk flyers in bad weather.
I can’t imagine an “open to the general public” flying car system that didn’t involve huge amounts of automation, basically self-flying planes. A modern jet liner is effectively self-flying already. And, even though the pilots are rarely required to take direct control over the jets the alcohol limit is 0% and they’re not even allowed to drink within 8 hours of a flight. So, to have a scenario with “drunk flyers in bad weather” you’d need a system with looser rules than current aviation, and less automation that current aviation.
Also, there’s no air bag in the world that can save you in a crash.
No, but there are parachutes.
Besides, most fiction involving flying cars also involves automated flying cars. Sure, often the “hero” takes direct control of the car and does some crazy maneuvers with it, but in the futures where flying cars exist, autopilots are extremely advanced, and most commuters just hit the button and relax. In addition, if an autopilot did exist, it could become “driver assist” if the human decides to take “direct control”. So, even in a future with frustrated aerial commuters who get “sky rage” and decide to take over flying from the autopilot, a “pilot assist” program could still interpret what they want and limit the danger they pose to themselves or other craft.
The F-16 is almost 50 years old now, and for those 50 years it has been impossible for pilots to fly it with “assists off”. The plane was designed from the start to be dynamically unstable. A pilot simply couldn’t control it without computer assistance. The pilot uses a fly-by-wire system where their inputs are interpreted by computers that do the right thing while still maintaining stability and so-on. A future flying car would pretty obviously be designed the same way.
Yeah, as I was writing that, I was thinking about '80s flying car lanes. It’s like a flow of cars with constant speed. But the ‘drunk flyers’ bit meant that we are humans. You’re also not allowed to drive drunk on the roads. That doesn’t prevent people from still doing that.
Good that you’ve mentioned the F-16, I’m just watching a video on them by Real Engineering on YouTube. I can only recommend the channel, and I’m not even an engineering nerd. Well, not yet.
EDIT: Yeah, a few more minutes into the video I think we both watched the same : ).
I haven’t watched a video on the F-16 for ages. I am just an aviation fan and have heard many stories of the F-16 over the years.
I don’t know if it’s mentioned in that video, but the early days of the F-16 were really interesting. It was the first ever fly-by-wire fighter, so there were lots of design issues to work out. The very first versions of the F-16 (maybe still the YF-16 at that stage) used a side-stick that didn’t move at all, it was designed to be pressure-sensitive so pilots could pull lightly to put a little bit of elevator pressure on, or pull hard to go to the elevators’ max deflection. The problem was that pilots never knew when they had reached the limits, so they pushed as hard as they could on the stick. Observers said that you could actually see a twitch in the control surfaces when pilots were at the max, and the twitch was due to being able to see the pulse of the pilot.
After a short time, General Dynamics switched to a side stick that had some range of motion, so that pilots knew when they were at the limits of the controls and didn’t keep pushing.
Yeah, they mentioned it in the video. That whole plane is just an awesome thing. It’s crazy how many modern sounding features they could shove into it so long ago.
As for the stick, AFAIK the pilots couldn’t tell the difference between moving it with 40% or 60% of the force needed, and the feedback loop was delayed.
I guess it’s just the timing then, because these were the main points of the video too.
They’re working on next generation air traffic control, that is automated and also can handle drones whizzing around next to flying cars, but developing that isn’t fast or cheap or deploy and will need extra equipment on the ground and in the cockpit.
…and that’s still just for the drones.
The amount of energy required to keep something in the air instead of using the ground is also astronomically bigger
Not really. Many planes can get about 20 miles per gallon traveling at about 180 miles per hour. That’s slightly more than a family car, but not astronomically more.
The big differences are that there’s effectively no “traffic” in the air, so once you dial in a cruise speed you stay at that speed for the entire flight. In a car you can get stuck in stop-and-go traffic. There’s also the lack of “rolling resistance” in the air. Even if you’re going a steady speed on a highway your tires are a source of drag. On the other hand, taxing and taking off can burn gallons of fuel, so unless you’re going for a fairly long flight that’s a significant part of the fuel burn. Also, planes go in a straight line, whereas cars have to follow highways. But, the total fuel cost of the trip really includes the trip to/from the airports.
But, fundamentally, the fuel economy of cars and airplanes is pretty similar.
The average person can barely drive without murdering someone. Flying is even more complex than that, the noise is just a small problem compqred to that.
Flying cars would almost certainly not be directly piloted. Even in movies, by the time humanity has flying cars, it has automation to handle those flying cars.
I feel this could actually work fairly well in smaller rural/suburban communities
That’s where range issues pop up.
And poachers perhaps
Maybe if they used bigger craft with larger payload capacity and longer range
The problem is that the bigger and heavier the craft the higher it’s minimum drop height is going to be because it’s more dangerous and needs more clearance.
Obviously it also becomes much more costly to run.
Put a little parachute on the package to soften the fall! /s
That made me laugh… I was imagining a small parachute hooked up to a plasma TV 😲
The UK drone delivery does that
And maybe that craft could have wheels instead of rotors to mitigate the rain/wind problems… i think we might be on to something here!
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not even necessary a bigger capacity I mean it being just able to bring me like a bag of chips or something I forgot for dinner would be great
While people will undoubtedly take the piss, for a number of reasons, it’s less energy expenditure / lower footprint than you getting in your car/truck and going to the store and getting them yourself.
If you factor in all the logistics and systems necessary to run the drone operations and all associated functions, is it likely to be much of a saving?
I could see something like this as useful for medical prescription delivery, but that comes with its own issues and dangers.
Yeah, almost definitely. Even if those systems have a relatively high power draw, they’re still not being powered by a low efficiency ice engine but are being powered by a grid that’s only getting greener. Also factor in the fact that a car+person is minimum about 1100kg that needs to be transported as opposed to the low weight items plus the weight of the drone (can’t be more than 2-3 kg)
Would it be less energy expenditure than a delivery van making multiple stops on its way to deliver you your bag of chips?
Like a Chinook!?
Haha, now I am picturing a huge Chinook delivering the smallest package of essentially bullshit to my door.
Yeah, I am totally behind that idea.
Or one of the ch54 skycranes delivering a shipping container of amazon returns to the auction winners.
I remember people were hyped when they announced on Thanksgiving 2012 that drone delivery service was right around the corner. Brilliant marketing from them because people were hyped.
I remember people being hyped about netting them or shooting them out of the sky.
Turns out the FAA is that corner
Welcome to the future
As someone who frequently orders one can of soup, this is excellent news.
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man killed by falling soup can which he ordered on Amazon
I’m pretty sure a twelve foot drop onto concrete isn’t good for a can of soup. Maybe it’d work for a T-shirt?
Or a beer… As long as it’s Lite Beer!
People buy clothes off of Amazon?
As long as you don’t leave your car in the driveway.
Dropping a can of soup 12ft onto a driveway seems bad for the can and for the driveway.
Self-opening soup can
It’ll be in Amazon packaging.
Can of soup wrapped in a brown cardstock bag 👍🏼
Just give it a tiny parachute
Operation Gumbo Drop
For those of us who order one can of beer, please wish us luck when we go to open it
The program itself isn’t absurd, but Amazon is a bunch of fucking clowns. I only expect them to fail in the world of logistics. But they’re so big & everybody keeps giving them their money, they can do whatever they want, poorly, forever. They fail ‘up’.
Drone delivery is indeed part of the future of logistics. They just need to make the drones more robust to handle slightly bigger, heavier loads, like at least 10# would be great & a reasonable goal. Arm it with AI so it knows where to drop the payload. Etc etc. There are indeed a number of kinks to be worked out…and who better to crash & burn, learn on than Amazon? 🤡
I live on the 10th story of an apartment building. Where does the drone deliver my 10 pound load to?
I live in a duplex with a front yard that’s about two square feet between the front stoop and the sidewalk. Where does the drone deliver my 10 pound load to?
I live in a house surrounded by a lot of trees. Where does the drone deliver my 10 pound load to?
I have an enclosed front porch, inside of which deliveries can safely be left without worrying about them being stolen. Where does the drone deliver my 10 pound load to?
Drone delivery to someone’s home might be useful for a small number of people in specific circumstances. Most circumstances would be far more efficient if done by a human.
What does this actually solve?
In all of the above, where either the landlord or the recipient specifies (and when it’s decided by the landlord, the buyer gets precise location info to pass to Amazon when buying stuff, which would include instructions for how to retrieve it after delivery)
In all cases the property owner would be responsible for ensuring there’s a suitable landing location. Preferably combined with lockboxes which drones can directly deposit packages to.
I agree with the others that aerial drones is usually not the most efficient. But in some cases the destination is complicated to reach by foot and then they’re useful. Otherwise land based drones could easily be used (imagine a Segway style delivery bot!)
What problem does a drone delivering a package to a lockbox instead of a person doing it solve? Other than Amazon’s problem of spending money to pay human beings wages?
If it’s a box/home easily reachable from the road, not much. In places with bad road infrastructure, it can save a fair amount of time
Ok, but that’s not where they’re testing it or what they appear to be trying to achieve. So that doesn’t really apply to this specific program.
In Germany we have a trial run of food delivery. A drone will bring a package with up to 4.5 kg to a “remote” village, then some students on e-bikes will bring it to the houses. Why they are using drones instead of one lorry a day is unknown.
Having students bike the final mile sounds a lot like Theranos saying they could do all these amazing blood tests on their new, futuristic machine, only to find out that they’re still doing most of them the way all labs did them
I’ve seen videos of a firm doing interesting stuff with bigger “mothership” drones that hover much higher and then lower a much smaller drone like thing on a cable to place the parcel on the ground. They can hit pretty precise targets and can maneuver around more obstacles than bigger drones can.
All that needs to happen is for the tech to advance to the point where it’s cheaper to do x% of their deliveries via automated drones than it would cost to have delivery drivers do it and they’ll start doing it. Saving millions(billions?) by say halving the number of human operated delivery trucks will make it a no brainer for them.
Are the mothership drones blimp types?
Oh they weren’t that big, though maybe you could have a super mothership carrier style thing one day lol.
Turns out it was on a Mark Rober video where I saw the drones. Made by zipline who’ve been doing interesting things with emergency drone deliveries in Rwanda for years and have a lot of backing.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/DOWDNBu9DkU?si=pe3Cp5uW7wWqOT7T
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I get that this is probably more a learning experience than anything…butttt
The way the world is going and the conditions this thing needs to operate? Idk man
This service was announced more than a decade ago. If they’re still having learning experiences, I think they may be trying too hard to get this to work.
Yeah, why wouldn’t they just give up after a couple of years, silly people.
Reminds me of an insurance company that wanted to use drones to survey roof damage and in the long run they decided it was overall better to just use a camera on a long ass stick.
Just so you know, companies already use drones for roof surveys. I work for sunrun and we use them to analyze roofs for solar installations and whether roofs need to be fixed before hand.
Yeah this sounds like a great use for drones- take photos of high up places that is dangerous to climb to
Aerial drones are a particularly stupid method of delivery. Delivery trucks, combined with terrestrial delivery robots are a much more versatile approach.
Delivery trucks require a human to drive. And despite the insistence otherwise, we are a long long way from any sort of automated driving system. They also operate on a 2-dimensional plane and have to navigate around a variety of structures.
Conversely, aerial automation is significantly easier since it is 3-dimensional and there are not obstacles to navigate. This also means it’s much easier to automate.
Companies like Zipline have been operating these services for many years now with great success.
Delivery trucks require a human to drive.
Ok… and? How is that a problem that needs solving?
Waste of resources. A human can do other things besides drive a van around all day. We spend all this money educating people. So they can do a job a person with a 3rd grade education can do?
Been in automation a long time. Have personally witnessed the primary task of a worker being replaced by a bin.
We should encourage anything that gets rid of mindless tasks and dehumanizes workers
And they should do what instead to put food on the table?
Find other work? I apologize the rest of the human race doesn’t want to subsidize your lifestyle of thinking as little as possible.
What other work? Do jobs just appear out of the ether for people with delivery experience on their resume?
UBI comes to mind.
Maybe we should implement that first and fire all the delivery people second? But as long as Amazon saves money, that’s the important thing.
Humans are expensive and error-prone.
Weird, they seem to have done just fine delivering things for centuries now…
And they did just fine plowing up fields by hand.
Replacing the hand plow with the horse plow didn’t needlessly cost anyone their job.
Define “just fine”? Needless deaths and property damage are caused by human drivers all the time. I mean we could deliver things “just fine” on foot but everyone would be waiting a lot longer…
All the time? I’d like to see the statistics on deaths caused by delivery drivers.
And I’m not sure why you think similar things wouldn’t happen with drones.
How is the delivery drone going to navigate around my wire antennas strung between the trees?
Even when you know where they are, they’re hard to see unless the sun hits them just right.
I suspect that would be your responsibility to either clear the area or not use the service. I can see the service having some useful niche case uses. Mainly if you need something light on short notice.
Or you’d have to 3D map your own local environment and keep it updated so the drones know where obstacles are when entering your property’s airspace
I would be fine with that. Looks like a big use case they want this service for is their pharmacy side. Get your teledoctors appointment via their app and the meds delivered via drone within the hour.
And it will keep on being a joke until, suddenly, one day it’s not.
The joke are the people that believe drone delivery won’t be a thing.
I won’t say never, but when and how will drone delivery be more efficient than a truck?
Per package it’s more energy, it’s more risk, and the tech is harder.
To purchase a fleet of drones big enough will cost more than paying a driver for a long time still.
Per package it’s more energy
How you figure? compared to point to point electrical energy costs compared to moving a truck mass around streets with constant stopping/starting?
It’s the same as a train, by moving bulk you reduce average costs. Plus drones have to stay in the air, and travel from their base for each package, whereas if a truck has two stops on a street it’s moving less distance.
Train isn’t doing point to point.
You’re gonna have to actually do the calculations before making claims.
Pretty much everybody in this thread who is laughing at Amazon’s drones is thinking of drones as they are right now. But Amazon is not using drones because it’s a good idea now. They’re using drones now so they already have the experience and the setup when inevitable technical progress happens.
The drones might never work out or they might eventually work out, but this is exactly how Amazon got so big in the first place. They started selling books online when a lot of people still weren’t sure whether that could work and they started selling cloud computing almost ten years before anyone else thought to do that.
Fair, but the flying drone delivery in my opinion doesn’t scale up.
I think the real savings would be in something like a robot moving packages from the truck or a mobile base to the door.
I’ll bite.
Drones are loud as fuck and if drone delivery became common there would be a massive backlash from the public. Most people live in cities and do not have a yard to put a target on lol. Drone delivery in cities is almost certainly less cost efficient than truck delivery. Land drones are much more likely in cities, or just dudes with cargo bikes like in many European cities.
So yeah drone delivery might “become a thing” but I doubt it will be mainstream.
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And that’s not even getting into the point of how much easier and less illegal it is to snipe an Amazon drone out of the sky for its payload than it is to assault an Amazon delivery truck and driver. It may not be more common in the long run than porch pirates, because that’s also easy and low risk, but I 100% fully guarantee you our redneck population will be out in some capacity hunting for Christmas presents.
“In the land of the drones, the man with the t-shirt cannon is king.”
I’m setting up nets as we speak! Going to trawl the skies for goods
I’m not gonna lie, this had never occurred to me. But now that it has, it is 100% gonna be my hobby of the future
Bow hunting both gives the drone a sporting chance, and helps you soak in that Horizon Zero Dawn feel.
Instructions unclear, built air compressor powered blunderbuss
Places like Los Angeles are mostly SFH. Most areas are already loud as fuck from road noise, proximity to airports, etc. Nobody will notice a few drones.
If it becomes popular in LA, that’s pretty much definition of mainstream.
It is remarkable to me how tolerant as a society we have gotten to noise. We just accept that someone has a right to drive modified motorcycles at 3am with 8 of their buddies.
It isn’t legal (in US) and cops do occasionally set up decibel traps, especially in places frequently visited by motorcyclists, but I completely agree with you. Quiet nights outside of city feel strange now.
We have Wing in Australia and gotta say getting small tech delivered or medicine by drone is very convenient. It gets lowered instead of dropped.
The drone planes in Africa delivering medical supplies are amazing.
can’t fly when too hot
What the fuck?! My cheap ass, $10 AirHog drone that is entirely plastic and foam can fly in 115F temps (as hot as it’s ever been here). What the shit kind of crappy components do Amazon’s delivery drones use?!
Flying with a payload requires a lot more lift which goes down as temps go up, plus it could be just the heating of the motors under load that have a certain limit before they tend to fail.
They’re using a very dated design because the FAA moves extremely slowly. The size, weight, and wide-scale intended use of them puts the drones in an aircraft category that comes with a lot of paperwork and stipulations.
Ew… Bureaucracy.
In this case I would consider that a good thing. The day drone delivery because common will be a very noisy day.
Maybe just a safety precaution for lipo batteries? Given the potential hazard of bursting into flame near or on a house
The primary factor is probably air density. Hot air is less dense than cold air. Humid air is less dense than dry air. High altitude air is less dense than low altitude. Hot, humid, and high, an aircraft’s available payload could be a small fraction of its cold, dry, and sea level capacity.
The difference in air density from 0°C to 45°C is only around 20%. I can’t imagine that would be enough to cause problems, assuming the drones have a decent safety margin. I think it’s more likely it’s a safety precaution for the electronics.
If I’m honest it really is not at all surprising.
Another more successful operation in Rwanda and Ghana is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_company) delivering 1.8kg over 300km and dropped by parachute.
It’s certainly more useful in locations with insufficient infrastructure.
That works for special use cases in rural environments. They use drones for mail delivery on some German islands, for instance. As a mainstream delivery option in urban environments this is just laughably impractical and that has been very obvious from day one.
I would like to take this time to thank the slow government FAA for preventing Amazon from clogging up the airspace with crappy drones and preventing a stupid system from taking off.
Aside from all the functional downsides, I’d expect these to go the way of Tesla when hitting a larger scale. Lawsuits and traffic incidents.
I’m curious why the limit is one item. If the drone can carry 5 pounds, why can’t they put 5 pounds of stuff in the box?
Maybe is the delivery part, like you can make it easy to make one drop, but to select one from the individual packages to drop while leaving the other are not as easy.
