AMAZING NEW TECH DELIVERY BY DRONES

Amazon Prime Air: Delivery by Drones Could Arrive As Early as 2015

Dec. 1, 2013

By JOANNA STERN

JOANNA STERNMore From Joanna »

Technology Editor

With Prime Air, Amazon is hoping to deliver packages with drones.

Courtesy Amazon

For the next few weeks UPS, FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service will be working overtime to make sure you get your holiday gifts on time, but if Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gets his way, in the future, it might be delivery drones working those extra hours.

In an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday evening, Bezos unveiled Amazon Prime Air, a service that delivers packages via autonomous drones. With the service, Bezos said he hopes that the company will be able to deliver packages into customers hands within 30 minutes of the time they place an order.

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The package is pulled off the lines by the octocopter, and then using GPS it is directed to the delivery address. When it arrives it releases the package on the doorstep. Because the octocopter has eight blades, Bezos said, if one broke the drone would still be able to safely drop off a package. As many have remarked, it looks like something out of the Jetsons.

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But the future will take some time to arrive, and it's not because of technology capabilities.

"The hardest challenge in making this happen is demonstrating to the standards of the FAA that this is a safe thing to do. This is years of additional work at this point," Bezos said.

The FAA's rules surrounding unmanned aerial vehicles could be in place as early as 2015, Amazon says.

Still Bezos seems to have no doubt that this is the future of shopping. In an interview with ABC News earlier this year, Bezos said that he counts on some of the core customer expectations when building Amazon's future.

"The most important things are the big pieces of stability -- the rocks in the future -- that you can count on. For example in Amazon's retail business, I know that people will want low prices 10 years from now. I know they will want fast delivery," he said.  

And the drones seem to be the first step to that last goal mentioned by Bezos.

"I know this looks like science fiction -- it's not," Bezos told CBS. "It will work and it will happen. It's going to be a lot of fun."

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed an experimental drone-based delivery service in a 60 Minutes segment on Sunday. Bezos said the service, dubbed Amazon Prime Air, could be ready for customer use in “four or five years.”

“I know this looks like science fiction, it’s not,” said Bezos, before adding that “this is early, this is still years away.”

Bezos said the drone could carry objects of up to 5 lb. (2.27 kg) within a 10-mile (16 km) radius of an Amazon distribution center. Given that Amazon has been steadily building distribution centers in an increasing number of urban areas, the service would theoretically cover a significant number of customers.

The craft are autonomous, per Bezos: an Amazon employee would enter a delivery recipient’s location and away the aircraft would fly.

“The hard part here is putting in all the redundancy,” Bezos told interviewer Charlie Rose. “All the reliability to say this can’t land on somebody’s head.”

Amazon’s drone delivery service will also have to comply with the Federal Aviation Administration’s new airspace rules for unmanned aircraft, which the agency is planning to have in place by 2015.

After the 60 Minutes segment aired, Amazon shared this footage showing the system in use:

In preview segments, Bezos promised “something he wanted to unveil for the first time,” leading people on Twitter to speculate that it could be an Amazon television. Others joked that perhaps Bezos would buy CBS (he stunned the media world when it was announced in August that he had bought the Washington Post for $250 million). At least one guesser hit the nail exactly on the head: