
Amazon Promised Drone Delivery in Five Years Five Years Ago - oldgradstudent
https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/amazon-promised-drone-delivery-in-five-years-five-ye-1830818625
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JoeSmithson
I remember in 2013 when Amazon announced their 30 minute drone delivery
system, the British bookshop Waterstones announced their competing O.W.L.S
system [https://www.waterstones.com/blog/introducing-o-w-
l-s](https://www.waterstones.com/blog/introducing-o-w-l-s)

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kjullien
Not Amazon but drone delivery is becoming a thing, a startup called Zipline is
currently (successfully) running trials in Rwanda of drones that are used to
deliver blood to hospitals where it would never be able to arrive in a timely
fashion otherwise (because of terrain, poor access etc). From what I remember
delivery time was about half an hour. It is however clearly not as elegant a
solution as Amazon was proposing with their quadcopters, Zipline uses scaled
model airplanes with an old-school tail catch system for "landing" (same
concept on aircraft carriers). Not "elegant" but certainly gets the job done.
I know I saw a YouTube video covering this recently but cannot find the link
sadly.

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PavlovsCat
I never heard of this before, made my day, thanks :)

[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zipline+rwanda](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zipline+rwanda)

[http://www.flyzipline.com/](http://www.flyzipline.com/)

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butisaidsudo
Five years ago, just before Christmas, everyone was taking about Amazon drone
delivery. My hairdresser brought it up to me. My dad was talking about getting
his guns out of storage so he could take a pot shot or two. A lot of people
who had never ordered a single thing from Amazon were bringing it up. Just
before Christmas. Pretty effective if you ask me.

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xte
Well... Drone delivery _may_ work in countryside, where people live in
personal homes not apartments, perhaps with a bit of green flat area suitable
for landing and leave a small package.

It's essentially unfeasible in cities where nearly anyone live in apartments,
with dense roads, no clearly identifiable landing site, no place to fly
without being on to of many people's head etc.

I dream a society in which we are few enough to live all in large are and we
can easily travel with personal STOL small planes and goods can travel longer
paths on waterway/railway to be delivered by truck or planes only for the last
small trip. But that's a dream really hard to realize especially these days.

It's the same for electric cars: I'd love them if they have small rechargeable
batteries like water bottle basket that I can simply change by hand and their
charge last long as traditional car range or better. I'd love to have small
"generators" on board like Star Trek reactors, but that's a dream. And I do
live in reality, at least last time I checked...

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8note
my apartment in Seattle has a specific drone landing spot

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xte
May I ask how a drone can locate your apartment? Because I can easily imaging
to give coordinates of a garden with a precision suitable for a delivery but I
can't imaging something that can really work in apartments... Perhaps
penthouse apartments, perhaps some new apartments with specially crafted sign
to be identified with reasonable safety by the drone but certainly not
something that can work at a scale...

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

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

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tinkerteller
It's not technology problem but execution problem. The 5 lbs/20 mi drones are
quite feasible in wide urban areas to pre-selected customers. FAA is no longer
a problem. It's all about deploy to small group, iterate and expand. But team
there seems to be taking extra-ordinarily cautious approach until everything
gets perfect - which it probably never will. Typically you don't see media to
follow up on 5 year old promises of a CEO so this could very well might be hit
piece generated by some insider. Anyway, I suppose Paul Viola's days there are
numbered now. It's surprised they survived this long under Bezos without
delivering anything at all.

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adrianmonk
The whole thing was always for PR purposes anyway. It's not a coincidence that
it was announced on December 1st, right at the beginning of Christmas shopping
season.

I have no doubt they hired real engineers to build a real prototype. Maybe
they even hoped it could turn out to be practical. But the primary motivation
and the end game was always to get people talking about Amazon during the
critical shopping period.

(On a side note, the whole thing has a striking symbolic aspect to it. How
does Santa Claus deliver Christmas goodies? He magically flies to your house
and delivers them directly from the sky. And the drones do exactly the same
thing.)

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dbliss
As an engineer with Amazon, I can say with 100% (edit: 99.99%) certainty
(without any insider knowledge on the drone program), that PR was not the
primary driver of this. I would say you have it backwards. Amazon hired
engineers to build it (and probably still are) THEN used it as a PR
opportunity.

To say "The whole thing was always for PR purposes anyway" is a fundamental
misunderstanding of how Amazon works internally.

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8note
More likely, somebody wanted to have fun with drones, then went about trying
to sell it to amazon higher ups

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bluescrn
...and it’s still no closer to being practical, legal, or safe.

Small drones have a very limited range and payload capacity. And how would
they deliver to offices or apartments (with no private garden or driveway to
land or drop the parcels)? How would they avoid collisions with anything from
skyscrapers to trees to power lines? (Does that level of 3D map data exist
yet)

How do they prevent the risk of propellor related injuries, or of stolen
drones (perhaps even shot down ‘for the loot’)

Then there’s the FAA (and other aviation regulators worldwide) to deal with.

Still seems like a marketing stunt for now, or a much-longer-term goal

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rchaud
There's a 2014 episode of Parks & Recreation (set in 2017) where Ron shoots a
delivery drone from a fictional company called Gryzzl, because it was flying
over his property.

How on earth would drone delivery work in a country where there are more guns
than people? And for places where there aren't that many, there are plenty of
pranksters that would happily try taking one of these down to reignite their
failing Youtube channel.

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jhayward
It is illegal to discharge a firearm in almost all incorporated areas in the
United States, barring a very unusual emergency need. Almost all drone flights
would be, statistically, in these areas. So probably not even worth worrying
about as a problem.

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8note
in Canada up north, people shoot at passing airplanes fairly frequently

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twoodfin
Contemporaneous hn discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6830566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6830566)

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laluser
Given the FAA rules on this (line of sight from operators), there's just no
way that this could work. It basically defeats the whole purpose of using
autonomous drones in the first place. Even if the rules were modified in their
favor, it's dubious whether the infrastructure investment and potential for
liability would be worth it for Amazon.

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ehsankia
Which is why Google is testing theirs in Australia.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/17/alphabet-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/17/alphabet-
google-tests-project-wing-drone-hybrid-delivering-burritos-rural-australia)

~~~
laluser
Yep, Amazon is testing in other places as well.

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

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scarejunba
Amazon has no fear of failure. The Fire phone comes to mind. They roll with
the punches and just go on to the next product. They also have the scale to
explore every ‘stupid idea’ to some degree. Good for them.

I doubt they’re “hoping everyone will forget”. More they just abandon what
doesn’t work.

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kjullien
This is pretty much the spirit of Google too, start a service, have no users,
discontinue service. The problem with this is that most of these ideas don't
work because they are usually too early for their time. Which is quite stupid
when you think about it retroactively. If they kept going at it, Google could
of had a successful social media platform (Dodgeball), they discontinued the
v1 of Instagram, Picasa and they could of been Foursquare with Hotpot... Now
the question is was it a good idea to stop these and maybe save a couple
hundred K a year ? Retroactively, of course no, but I would argue that even at
the time it was a bad idea, why waste RnD when you can easily afford to keep
it going for decades without it generating any profit... Move fast and break
things but don't trash them...

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

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

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

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

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gonesilent
The first Prime AIR stuff was just a marketing attack on the Apple Air tablet
to spike traffic for its own tablet. All Apples Air name maketing got lost in
the Prime Air story's.

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oldgradstudent
I vaguely recall it was a PR attack against multiple reports about the work
conditions in their warehouses, especially in the UK.

One example that appeared the week before the reveal:
[https://www.bbc.com/news/business-25034598](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-25034598)

