UK: Amazon Pledges Drone Delivery Parcels Flown to Customers Within The Hour

Is this anoth­er promise or just more cry wolf? It has been 10 years since Ama­zon pledged par­cel drone deliv­er­ies by 2018. First announced via a major fan­fare on a CBS TV 60 Min­utes Spe­cial in 2013, it turned out to be hol­low. 

Dogged with tech­ni­cal prob­lems and com­plaints of noise, Ama­zon drones have fall­en well behind its com­peti­tors, yet it is attempt­ing to revive the vision by announc­ing this week, the UK will be next for deliv­ery tri­als in late 2024. No location/s have been spec­i­fied yet, although the com­pa­ny says the first area will be named ear­ly next year. The UK main­stream media has giv­en the news blan­ket cov­er­age.

The company’s renewed deter­mi­na­tion has come after recent U.S tri­als at two loca­tions. One in the small Cal­i­forn­ian town of Lock­e­ford with a pop­u­la­tion of 3,500 peo­ple and Col­lege Sta­tion, Texas, the home to 115,000 res­i­dents and the Texas A&M Uni­ver­si­ty. Prod­ucts weigh­ing no more than 5lbs are being deliv­ered.

Yet, these have been laden with crit­i­cism too with loud noise being a pri­ma­ry one. Ama­zon has not revealed how many cus­tomers are opt­ing to get their orders by air cur­rent­ly, claim­ing only that “thou­sands of deliv­er­ies” had been made from these two sites.

The BBC has added an excel­lent video to its own news arti­cle. On view­ing, what is sur­pris­ing is that Ama­zon do not even use a teth­er to drop items. For, the par­cel is sim­ply eject­ed out from a chute falling eight feet below on to a basic make-shift land­ing pad. Pre­sum­ably, okay for books, but not for more frag­ile items. And as for the noisy drone being so close to the cus­tomers’ homes? The deliv­ery process looks pre­his­toric when com­pared to the advanced tech­nolo­gies now being employed by Zipline.

Ama­zon state a new, more improved green coloured craft, will be unveiled for the UK which it claims, “is 40 per­cent less noisy.” This lat­est MK30 drone can also work in light rain and wind and fly up to 12 kms on one elec­tric charge. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Wing also pro­duced a drone with a major reduc­tion of rotor noise, but the res­i­dent com­plaints still keep com­ing, espe­cial­ly in Aus­tralia.

Ama­zon says it is work­ing close­ly with the UK’s Civ­il Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty (CAA) to meet reg­u­la­tions, while the gov­ern­ment said the move would help it under­stand “how to best use the new tech­nol­o­gy safe­ly and secure­ly.”

Dave Car­bon and Amazon’s “Less Noisy” Deliv­ery Drone Set for The UK (Cred­it: BBC)

David Car­bon, Vice-Pres­i­dent of Ama­zon Prime Air, com­ment­ed there was demand for the tech­nol­o­gy in the UK and that it was ‘absolute­ly safe’. “It’s hun­dreds of times safer than dri­ving to the store,” he told the BBC in an inter­view in Seat­tle. “I’ve nev­er heard any­one say they wouldn’t want some­thing faster.”

UK cus­tomers will be able to choose from thou­sands of items which weigh 5lbs or less, from wash­ing up liq­uid and tooth­brush­es, to beau­ty prod­ucts and bat­ter­ies that can fill a shoe-box size pack­age.

Car­bon con­tin­ued, ”What our cus­tomers will do is jump on to the Ama­zon web­site, they’ll select drone deliv­ery if it’s avail­able in their area, they’ll order their prod­uct… and that will then set off the chain of events that goes to our ground sys­tem that finds the customer’s yard, drops pack­age off where they asked it, and we’re out of there.”

UK Avi­a­tion Min­is­ter, Baroness Char­lotte Vere, remarked, “Amazon’s announce­ment today is a fan­tas­tic exam­ple of Gov­ern­ment and indus­try com­ing togeth­er to achieve our shared vision for com­mer­cial drones to be com­mon­place in the UK by 2030. Not only will this help boost the econ­o­my, offer­ing con­sumers even more choice while help­ing keep the envi­ron­ment clean with zero emis­sion tech­nol­o­gy, but it will also build our under­stand­ing how to best use the new tech­nol­o­gy safe­ly and secure­ly.”

Baroness Char­lotte Vere

Fred­er­ic Laugere, Head of Inno­va­tion Advi­so­ry Ser­vices at the CAA, added, “It is vital that projects such as this take place to feed into the over­all knowl­edge and expe­ri­ences that will soon enable drones to be oper­at­ing beyond the line of sight of their pilot on a day-to-day basis, while also still allow­ing safe and equi­table use of the air by oth­er users.”

Mean­while, Ama­zon is also look­ing to launch so-called “ultra-fast” deliv­er­ies in a third US state and in Italy.

Car­bon has set a goal of 500 mil­lion glob­al Ama­zon drone deliv­er­ies per year by the end of the decade, includ­ing those in dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed sub­ur­ban areas. He stat­ed, ”We’ve designed the drone to oper­ate across a wide beach­front. You obvi­ous­ly fit with the com­mu­ni­ty and what cus­tomers need.”

Adding, ”I think it’s going to be a norm that parcels are deliv­ered by air. I don’t think that’s real­ly in ques­tion any­more.”

For more infor­ma­tion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Prime_Air

(News Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk)

(Top image: Ama­zon)

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