

Ask HN: How would you deploy Amazon Prime Air today? - aleem

I have no links to Amazon but am really rooting for something like this to become a reality. The few people I have spoken to have been skeptical and rightly so.<p>For starters, the last-mile problem is the trickiest as you get into urban sites. So in the mean time Amazon could negotiate pre-defined routes with the FAA that link the central warehouse to local depots. Drones would fly between this route and the route would be carefully chosen to mitigate disaster. The initial routes would also need to be chosen so that they have a natural advantage over the existing delivery network (say to and from an island or a mountainous location). Theft could be mitigated by doing overnight delivery where the darkness would provide some cover. It&#x27;s not end-to-end delivery but it&#x27;s a great start if you could just drive over to your local depot with the drone arriving at roughly the same time.<p>I could see that sort of pilot project get deployed tomorrow.<p>If you really had to make this a reality today and this was your day job, how would you go about it?
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derekp7
I would start with a controlled deployment -- either test it for delivering
supplies in various corporate office parks, or something like military bases
or college campuses. Something where the bulk of the ground being covered is
owned by the same organization. Then go from there.

