Expect deliveries by driverless cars before deliveries by drones
Amazon Prime Air
151–160 of 604 posts
Re: Amazon Prime Air
#152This concept and forward thinking is of the type I make a conscious effort to protect from skepticism and naysayers. Aside from any obvious or glaring safety issues, ideas like this one, that teeter on the reality-joke line, are the exact ones that bring about true disruption. And that's why I encourage everyone around me to keep an open and forgiving mind, like you would with a child.
Will Amazon Prime Air work? I don't know, but I hope so.
Re: Amazon Prime Air
#153i guess they will charge heavy for this delivery.
Re: Amazon Prime Air
#154Three letters:
E.M.P.
Re: Amazon Prime Air
#155http://www.amazon.com/primeair When will I be able to choose Prime Air as a delivery option? A: We hope the FAA's rules will be in place as early as sometime in 2015. We will be ready at that time. Sorry, but not a chance. I'm intimately familiar with the flight controller, motor and batter technology behind multi-rotors, and I can state unequivocally that this is just not ready for 'prime'-time (so-to-speak :) There…
Well, you know, Bezos is a pretty smart guy. So maybe he knows something about this technology that the rest of us don't. Maybe he has an upper hand over the current state-of-the-art.
Or maybe he's just orchestrating a little extra PR for Amazon on 60 minutes?
Re: Amazon Prime Air
#156If it were not December, I would assume this was an april fools joke.
Re: Amazon Prime Air
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that rain, snow, or modest winds should be problematic for any properly equipped drone.
I've flown gas and electric helicopters and airplanes as a hobby over the years. These small aircraft are very susceptible to bad weather. They're already going to be carrying a significant load with an attached package. They won't be able to handle a great deal of weather adversity.
> They won't be able to handle a great deal of weather adversity.
I have less experience than you in the field, but I suspect that Amazon would not be promulgating such a service if it had such obvious fatal flaws.
Re: Amazon Prime Air
#158http://www.amazon.com/primeair When will I be able to choose Prime Air as a delivery option? A: We hope the FAA's rules will be in place as early as sometime in 2015. We will be ready at that time. Sorry, but not a chance. I'm intimately familiar with the flight controller, motor and batter technology behind multi-rotors, and I can state unequivocally that this is just not ready for 'prime'-time (so-to-speak :) There…
>We hope the FAA's rules will be in place as early as sometime in 2015 Well, it is carefully crafted to say the rules will be in place, not the technology. The FAA could say Amazon needs to do X first where X is any one of the challenges you mentioned. I'm glad they put that in, though, because otherwise the threads are always full of "The FAA will never allow this" comments. The wording gives me a reassuring feeling…
> We will be ready at that time.
Except for, you know, that bit (the bit you cut out)
Re: Amazon Prime Air
#159Apart from the Scifi-ness of having drones work well in the best of conditions, the back-up infrastructure required to support bad conditions would seem to make the whole venture unrealistic. Let's say that a little drone could reliably carry a package to doorsteps 10 miles away. Let's assume that it can navigate past trees and power lines and kite strings and so forth. So Amazon builds up these service centers with…
Why can't Amazon just have the service be weather dependent like any air service? If some place has weather that makes drone delivery difficult, the option will be turned off.
They'll look at the weather in the next 30 minutes and judge whether or not the drone can fly. Pretty simple, right?
Re: Amazon Prime Air
#160http://www.amazon.com/primeair When will I be able to choose Prime Air as a delivery option? A: We hope the FAA's rules will be in place as early as sometime in 2015. We will be ready at that time. Sorry, but not a chance. I'm intimately familiar with the flight controller, motor and batter technology behind multi-rotors, and I can state unequivocally that this is just not ready for 'prime'-time (so-to-speak :) There…
Having to have several sets of batteries seems like on of the simpler problems to deal with.