With Prime Air, Amazon plans to deliver purchases via drones

` December 5, 2013

By Andrea ChangDecember 2, 2013, 1:05 a.m.

Delivery drones are on their way.

Amazon.com on Sunday introduced Prime Air, a futuristic delivery system that the company says will get packages into customers’ hands in half an hour or less, delivered via unmanned aerial vehicles.

The online retail behemoth posted a video on its website that shows images of a recent Prime Air test flight.

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In the 80-second clip, which you can watch below, a shopper buys an item on Amazon. The item is then placed into a plastic yellow Amazon container and picked up at the end of a conveyor belt by an Amazon drone, which takes off and soars over a grassy field before depositing the package with a thud outside the shopper’s doorstep.

“One day, Prime Air vehicles will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today,” the company said in a brief Q&A on its website.

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Amazon said the company has been working on Prime Air in its next-generation research and development lab, but cautioned that it would be a while before customers could choose it as a delivery option.

“Putting Prime Air into commercial use will take some number of years as we advance the technology and wait for the necessary FAA rules and regulations,” the company said.

Amazon added that it hoped the agency would put in place rules for unmanned aerial vehicles by 2015. “We will be ready at that time,” it said.

Amazon founder and Chief Executive Jeff Bezos introduced the delivery-by-drone concept during a segment on CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday. He said Prime Air would be available for packages weighing 5 pounds or less.

Already known for free, two-day delivery via its Amazon Prime membership program, the company has lately been experimenting with same-day delivery; it has also expanded its grocery delivery offerings and, most recently, announced that it was teaming with the U.S. Postal Service to deliver Amazon packages on Sundays.

JonHat at 7:33 PM December 04, 2013First of all this is a pr stunt, second of all this is a pr stunt

Third of all – if you live in an apartment or condo does the drone open the door too?

This will probably work someday but talking about 2015 come on thats silly. There is so much infrastructure, regulations to work out that it will take a seriously long time for this to become a reality.

What could possibly work is have dropoff points all over this place and you could pick up there easily but actually having them go to your door step would require a lot of moving parts and laws coming together.

Rigel7 at 4:15 PM December 03, 2013Sounds similar to what they said about “Federal Express”. The doubters and naysayers stated there was no market for a “next day delivery” service anchored by overnight shipping by air. That such an idea was bound to fail and that people were satisfied with the tried and true “ground” services.

42 years later “FedEx” is a multi-billion dollar company that has revolutionized the package and cargo shipping industry. History repeats.

OhNoNotSteve at 2:30 PM December 03, 2013I saw the piece on 60 Minutes with Corporate Hack Charlie Rose. I hadn’t watched in a while and waited for something to be said about Amazon’s poor labor record, but got nothing. Twenty minutes of Amazon CEO getting brown-nosed, and free publicity. What a sad decline for a once-great news source.

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