Amazon is experimenting with drones that will provide half-hour, sameday delivery, though a formal introduction of the service, dubbed PrimeAir, is years away. Amazon chief Jeff Bezos showed off an early version of Amazon PrimeAir during a recent broadcast of CBS’ 60 Minutes. “I know this looks like science fiction, but it’s not,” Bezos told Charlie Rose. In a video demo, an Amazon user is shown ordering an item online. That item is placed in a plastic container and locked into an awaiting drone, which buzzes away and drops the package at the customer’s doorstep.
Amazon is not the only organization experimenting with drones. Last June, Dominos teased the “DomiCopter” for pizza delivery, though that was really more of a marketing gimmick. In October, PETA kicked off a project to use hobby-class drone planes to monitor hunters and capture any “illegal or cruel hunting practices.” And any company considering use of drones may have to look out: In December, hacker and security analyst Samy Kamkar published details about SkyJack, which he said “is a drone engineered to autonomously seek out, hack, and wirelessly take over other drones” within Wi-Fi distance, “creating an army of zombie drones under your control.” Whether Amazon will be successful, or whether the project will crash and burn, remains to be seen.
Bezos said PrimeAir containers can carry objects up to 5 pounds in weight, which covers as much as 86 percent of the objects Amazon delivers. “We’re not going to deliver kayaks or table saws” with PrimeAir, Bezos quipped. The devices use electric motors, so they will be more environmentally friendly, Bezos continued, as fewer trucks would be on the road. PrimeAir would have an approximately ten-mile radius, so in urban areas, its coverage range could be “very signi¿cant.” No word on how deliveries to apartment or of¿ce buildings might be handled, but Bezos said they would be autonomous and follow GPS coordinates. The “hard part,” Bezos admitted during the interview, would be reliability. A PrimeAir drone, he said, “can’t land on somebody’s head.” One major impediment to Amazon—or any other company—using drones is the Federal Aviation Administration, which currently bans the use of drones for commercial use. In 2012, however, President Obama signed the FAA Air Transportation Modernization and Safety Improvement Act, which includes a mandate to loosen up the restrictions and integrate commercial drones into the National Airspace System. In November, the Transportation Department revealed its long-term plan for making that a reality, but it won’t happen until at least 2015.
We may not know for sure for a while yet, however. Bezos told Rose that he is an “optimist” and hopes that PrimeAir could get off the ground in four to five years.
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