Imagine this. At noon on your lunch hour you buy a new cell-phone charger, a bottle of vitamins, or an emergency kitchen gizmo online and under 60 minutes a miniature aircraft is landing softly in your back yard. This scenario is about to be much more commonplace. Amazon plans to roll out its Prime Air drone service to close to 500 cities and towns across the country by the end of 2026 (6 times more than it currently does), bringing speedy drone delivery to tens of millions more residents.
The company is already present in Arizona Florida Kansas Louisiana Michigan, Nebraska and Texas. Launches are planned for metropolitan Chicago Syracuse Cleveland, Atlanta and Boise in the near term, with additional communities expected to come online later in the year. Each Prime Air location will serve around 175 square miles predominantly suburban neighborhoods where open space makes drone landings feasible.
Packages are limited to five pounds and must fit within a large shoebox. That restriction still includes over 60 percent of the products most frequently ordered by consumers, including electronics cosmetics medicines, household items and some groceries. Most of the flights take around an hour, but some of the quickest happen in 30 minutes. Amazon has claimed to have already done hundreds of thousands of these trips in 2015. David Carbon, Prime Air’s vice president, characterized the shipping option as a natural progression for customers who are used to receiving items on the same or next day. The service offers that rapidity with the shopability and range of products at Amazon’s usual price.
For Prime members, delivery by drone on large orders is free and purchases by drones cost a small amount of money. This all took time to develop. Amazon secured important approvals for extended range flights a couple of years ago and has continued to evolve its design, with improved obstacle avoidance, less noise and incorporation into huge robotic sort centers containing far more inventory.
Its aircraft utilize cameras and sensors instead of streaming live video of people below and is proud to explain this when concerns about privacy still sometimes arise in a few communities. Not all neighborhoods are eager to see this kind of change. Noise and visual disruption, and questions about the effect the growing frequency of low altittude flights may have on property values are concerns in locations where the service already exists.
Amazon is currently working with community officials and the Federal Aviation Administration to perfect routes and schedules. Though, the competitive argument is readily apparent. Walmart and other retailers are also piloting aerial delivery, making this a real race for the fastest last mile. For regular customers the message is straightforward. If you want something miniature, practical and in stock today, it will be a matter of time before it was available in hundreds of stores. Amazon is also pouring billions of dollars into dozens of ground-based delivery networks, urban micro-fulfillment centers and its trucking fleet so that drones are part of a larger and faster delivery plan.
