The last time I wrote about Amazon Prime Air was almost 2 years ago to the day and back then it seemed to be little more than a flight of fancy. Back then drones, whilst still being somewhat commonplace, were still something of an emerging space especially when it came to regulations and companies making use of them. Indeed the idea instantly ran afoul of the FAA, something which Amazon was surprisingly blase about at the time. Still there had been musings of them continuing development of the program and today they’ve shown off another prototype drone that they might use in the future.
The drone is an interesting beast, capable of both VTOL and regular flight. This was most likely done to increase the effective range of the craft as traditional flight is a lot less energy intensive than 100% VTOL flight. The new prototype drone has a stated range of 16 miles (about 25KM) which you’d probably have to cut in half for the return trip. Whilst that’s likely an order of magnitude above the previous prototype they showcased 2 years ago it still means that a serviced based on them will either be very limited or Amazon is planning a massive shakeup of its distribution network.
Of course the timing of this announcement (and the accompanying video below) mere hours before the yearly Cyber Monday sale starts in earnest can’t be denied. Amazon Prime Air is undeniably a marketing tactic, one that’s worked well enough in the past to warrant them trying it again in order to boost sales on this day. On the flip side Amazon does seem pretty committed to the idea, with their various proposals for airspace usage and “dozens of prototypes” in the works, however until they start offering the service to real customers it’s going to be easy to remain skeptical.
Last time I wrote about Amazon Prime Air one of my local readers mentioned that a similar service was looking to take off here in Australia. The offering was going to be a joint effort between Flirtey, a delivery drone developer, and Zookal a local text book sale and rent service. They were targeting mid last year for their first delivery by drone however that never came to pass. Indeed an article earlier this year was all I could dredge up on the service where they still have yet to use the service commercially. To their credit Flirtey did make the first drone delivery in the USA in July this year so the technology is there it just needs to be put to use.
Whether or not something like this will see widespread adoption however is something I’m still not sure on. Right now the centralized distribution models that most companies employ simply don’t work with the incredibly limited range that most drones have. Even if the range issue could be solved I’m still not sure if it would be economical to use them, unless the delivery fees were substantially higher (and then how many customers would pay for that?). Don’t get me wrong, I still think it’d be incredibly cool to get something delivered by drone, but at this point I’m still not 100% sold on the idea that it can be done economically.
