The video on 60 mins was pretty cool. All electric drone lands in front of your house, releases the container, then takes off. 10 mile range. No drone pilot needed. The container can hold and carry about 86% of what amazon delivers.

• Publicity stunt- sure, but still something they have a genuine interest in.
• Putting stuff on a porch- probably not possible, and the system requires a small/cheap helipad to land on. But the same helipad could be used for everything else the house orders too.
• Radius of service- only ten miles, but can be expanded with more distribution centers.
• Number of units- well, how many packages does the average house order at one time? It's true that several or many copters are required to duplicate the payload of a panel van, but probably not that many. The copters can also be scaled to do all that a van can do although I think the idea now is one per house. This is not a bad counter-argument though. Amazon obviously thinks this is a partial solution to their shipping needs at best.

You have to admire what Bezos has done with Amazon. That being said, now you have to wonder what he is thinking. First he spends 250 million on The Washington Post, a paper that is by most accounts DOA. Then in the same year he announces the Octocopter. I for one would love to be sitting in on the Amazon Board of Directors meeting as they try to decide how to spin this one.

Each house that wants something from amazon has to have a helipad; that will be neither small nor cheap. Imagine an apartment complex with your 300 neighbors all vying for the Ipad just delivered.

The radius of service cant be expanded with more distribution centers but the service area could be. At the cost of more inventory required.

It is not how many packages does the average house get a day, it is how many packages does the average neighborhood get a day.

I think the technology will be profitable but not in delivering package store to door.

Meet George Jetson, his boy Elroy, daughter Judy and Jane his wife

Flying cars come closer to reality .:. newkerala.com Online News - 96956

A couple of questions:

1. Will they ever be able to upscale the concept to deliver things like HDTV’s? What guarantee could they offer to prevent mishandling of those things? (such as the well publicized incident with a major delivery company)

2. Who will supervise and “fly” these things?

Solutions:

1. The guarantee should be “We’ll treat your package as well as we treat our employees” (I can feel the love already)

2. Don’t hire former train engineers. Leave the flying to pros.

The octocopters in question will not have human pilots to my knowledge. They will use gps much like the Google automated cars do now, and follow an approved route structure which could be city streets at low altitude. Any evasive or emergency maneuver will be carried out by onboard stability computers that already exist and are perfected. Some things that are yet to be determined are

• route structure
• weather handling
• systems failure
• (human) crimes against drones
• system overload handling
• acceptable failure rates
• oversight, regulation, and system monitoring

ABC news did a piece on the evening news tonight. Some of the problems include: not currently allowed by the FAA,
because ABC news is a business they could only demonstrate the drone indoors,
winds could easily cause the current drone to land in neighbors yard delivering package to the wrong address,
limited obstacle detection,
no obstacle avoidance.

They didn't even mention liability concerns. More free press however.