Aspiration to Acquisition via Direct
The means by which contemporary commerce is conducted changed forever on Friday, 23 December 2022.
As the larger world frantically occupied itself with holiday parties and last minute Christmas shopping, citizens of Lockeford, California and College Station, Texas marveled as the advent of Prime Air—Amazon’s much anticipated drone delivery service—played out in the skies above their respective towns.
Amazon’s goal is to deliver packages massing five-pound or less in under an hour.
While public statements and press releases regarding Prime Air have focused largely upon the safety and carbon neutrality of the unmanned delivery aircraft by which the platform is defined, Amazon’s guiding concern has been and remains enticing both extant and prospective customers to utilize the company’s retail platform—the world’s largest—by exploiting humankind’s natural predilection for instant gratification.
Amazon’s assertive but equivocal allusions to its major investments in logistics have been broadly construed indications of the company’s imminent shift from massive, regional fulfillment centers to a network of smaller, more widely-dispersed facilities.
Upon the service’s eventual (presumed) widespread release, Prime Air will reconcile seamlessly with Amazon’s ubiquitous online ordering system. At checkout, eligible customers will be offered—in addition to conventional shipping methods—a drone delivery option. Amazon states: “For these deliveries, the drone will fly to the designated delivery location, descend to the customer’s backyard, and hover at a safe height. It will then safely release the package and rise back up to altitude.”
In June 2022, more than nine-years after the company made public its intention to pursue a drone delivery scheme, Amazon formally announced it would launch and evaluate such an undertaking in the small town of Lockeford, California—some 29-nautical-miles southeast of Sacramento.
The business of stuffing innumerable sky-going contraptions full of kitchen utensils and cat toys, then sending them hurtling overland toward the unsuspecting denizens of smalltown America is a complex one. In devising solutions to drone delivery’s considerable logistical, regulatory, and environmental challenges, Amazon secured patents for an array of technologies germane to commercial Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) operations, including vehicle proximity monitoring and control, payload dynamics, autonomous landing, and vehicle charging. By virtue of its protracted and innovative efforts to develop and mature proprietary vehicle architectures and operational infrastructure, Amazon has exerted undeniable influence on the means by and manner in which autonomous aerial delivery will be implemented in the United States.
The wait for Amazon to deliver on founder Jeff Bezos’s 2013 announcement that a drone delivery service was in the works has been a long one. The extent to which the majority of Americans have yet to wait for Amazon drones laden with sub-five-pound packages to descend upon their communities will be largely determined by whatever successes or failures Prime Air racks up in Lockeford and College Station over the coming months.
NTSB Final Report: Douglas A-4K
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