Amazon Can Now Deliver Your Next iPhone With a Drone

[OverTheHill]

The FAA can barely manage existing airspace. Now throw in thousands of drones and the burgeoning personal transport industry.

What could possibly go wrong?

 

[OverTheHill]

We've run extensive analysis on this subject. There are a lot of factors to consider when calculating the Expected casualties (Ec) for drone operations over the public, including sheltering, angle of impact, mass of the drone, and area of impact (head, neck, thorax, etc). Ultimately, the FAA (and other regulatory bodies) typically aim for a probability of casualty around 1 in a million (1E-06). Certain types of activities (such as air passenger transport) have higher thresholds (1 in a billion). This is widely considered to be acceptable by the public at large. Which is to say, yes, someone might get hurt, but no, it won't be common enough to spark public outrage.

So incredibly naive. All it takes is one.

 

[tornadowrangler]

Speed and no drivers being dicks by throwing packages about, or handing it to the wrong address.

Would be great if I order something on Amazon, and it’s delivered by drone within 1 hour. I’m only a 10 minute drive from an Amazon warehouse, so a drone that can fly to me in a straight line, avoiding all traffic and with zero other people to deliver to at a decent speed could be with me pretty quickly.

Just deliver it to my back garden even if the gate is locked, and off it goes again, easier, faster and safer.

To me, this is one of those many ideas that seems good at first, but the more you think about it, the worse it is. If everyone had their own personal drone at the warehouse just sitting there waiting for their order. Sure, I guess. But let's consider the real world.

I don't see how it would be easier than van deliveries. It sounds like a very complicated way to deliver a package. So much can go wrong. Rain, high winds, extreme heat, extreme cold, fog, birds, trees, powerlines, dogs, cats, signal loss, navigational challenges, etc. I assume you'd need some kind of landing or drop-off target that you have to make sure is clear and visible. If it gets obstructed in any way, then the drone has to fly the package all the way back.

I also don't see it being faster in practice. A truck can load up with hundreds of deliveries and make one trip to deliver them all. Many stops are within a neighborhood or apartment complex, so the average mile-per-delivery can be very low. A drone would have to fly back and forth for every delivery. You can do the math, but it ends up with thousands of miles of drone flight to replace one delivery route.

Safer? Possibly... but we don't know the safety issues that thousands of drones flying through neighborhoods and cities would have. Drones do fail. Even if with a 99.99% success rate, that would be hundreds of drones per day that crash or fail in some way if they are the primary method of amazon deliveries.

Then there's the privacy issues. You'd have drones with cameras flying over people's backyards multiple times a day, which many will see as an invasion of privacy.

Perhaps they will keep doing this in select areas or markets. But it would take a lot to convince me that it would replace delivery vans for the vast majority of deliveries within the next few decades.

 

[Scoob Redux]

Would you be outraged if it was your child that got hurt or worse? Would it be acceptable?

Or would you stand there and say your kid was just an “expected casualty”?

You do realize that this is how all regulatory safety decisions are made right? I suppose you might be more comfortable not understanding the science and just going through life thinking that things just work out the way they do by happenstance. If you have trouble grasping probabilities of expected casualties (which are calculated every day by numerous industries to ensure compliance with government thresholds on public casualties), then your mind is really going to be blown when you find out that the government has determined the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) to be $13 million. This is used in calculations to determine whether specific safety measures are "worth it" to society.
Don't be afraid. It's just science.

 

[Scoob Redux]

So incredibly naive. All it takes is one.

Yep, and you've shown yourself.

 

[Fuzzball84]

You do realize that this is how all regulatory safety decisions are made right? I suppose you might be more comfortable not understanding the science and just going through life thinking that things just work out the way they do by happenstance. If you have trouble grasping probabilities of expected casualties (which are calculated every day by numerous industries to ensure compliance with government thresholds on public casualties), then your mind is really going to be blown when you find out that the government has determined the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) to be $13 million. This is used in calculations to determine whether specific safety measures are "worth it" to society.
Don't be afraid. It's just science.

I don’t know why you’re telling me all of this? Most people know there is a cost/benefit/risk analysis in all business and government operations.

But despite that… Tell me this, if a drone came down and hit a member of your family and killed them, would you tell yourself and remaining family that they should not be afraid, it’s just science/probabilities. That someone’s delivery was worth their life?

 

[Radeon85]

It's no different than a commercial plane crash landing on your house, it happens, but the chance it will happen to you is astronomically small. Same with drones, it's going to be a ridiculously small chance of a large commercial size drone literally crash landing on your head with enough force to kill you. Will it happen to someone eventually?, I wouldn't say no. If it does, then yes, it's just really bad luck.

Drones are very safe already and will continue to get even safer as the tech improves over time. Personally, I wouldn't worry about it.

 

[Scoob Redux]

I don’t know why you’re telling me all of this? Most people know there is a cost/benefit/risk analysis in all business and government operations.

But despite that… Tell me this, if a drone came down and hit a member of your family and killed them, would you tell yourself and remaining family that they should not be afraid, it’s just science/probabilities. That someone’s delivery was worth their life?

Absolutely! That's life. Just like if someone gets killed in an automobile accident, we say "oh, that's too bad", but we accept it as a society, because that's the math. Your lifetime odds of dying in a car crash are 1 in 95 (1.05E-02). But you aren't on a crusade to make cars illegal, are you? We shrug our shoulders and say "that's life". Same with drones, nuclear power plants, and extraterrestrial meteorites crashing through your roof. There's risk everywhere.

 

[Fuzzball84]

Absolutely! That's life. Just like if someone gets killed in an automobile accident, we say "oh, that's too bad", but we accept it as a society, because that's the math. Your lifetime odds of dying in a car crash are 1 in 95 (1.05E-02). But you aren't on a crusade to make cars illegal, are you? We shrug our shoulders and say "that's life". Same with drones, nuclear power plants, and extraterrestrial meteorites crashing through your roof. There's risk everywhere.

Damn

So you’d just shrug your shoulders if an Amazon delivery drone came down on a member of your family?

That’s life!

 

[Scoob Redux]

Damn

So you’d just shrug your shoulders if an Amazon delivery drone came down on a member of your family?

That’s life!

Of course the event is bad for whomever it affects. My point is, the odds of that happening to me or a family member are planned and allocated by the FAA such that it's HIGHLY unlikely to happen to me or anyone I know. On the other hand, if FAA regulations allowed higher risk, then it would happen more often and the public would be "outraged" due to the high number of occurrences. About 120 people will die today in U.S. auto accidents. All of those families affected will be very sad. But as a SOCIETY, it's not enough to "outrage" us and cause us to outlaw cars. My whole point has been that the drone operations will be required to meet a certain level of reliability such that the risk falls into "acceptable" parameters.

 

[OverTheHill]

Yep, and you've shown yourself.

People move into their home understanding their risk relative to their location in proximity to an airport and within navigable airspace. If you’re in an overflight area, your loan docs disclose this. I didn’t sign on for thousands of drones over my house every year, which is what this would bring. It constitutes a taking. You’ve shown yourself. Bring on your EIR for this and I’ll completely shred it in about 10 minutes.

 

[Lioness~]

In my country (Sweden) most Amazon delivery guys can't even use port codes to get in and deliver packages. While all other delivery companies do it effortlessly. Most of the those Amazon guys don’t speak Swedish and usually not much English either for that matter.

So I’ve dropped their home delivery service and have them deliver to my closest postal agent, which are awesome - It takes less time for me.
Drones to my balcony would be very nice, but I suspect they are not up to that here before 2030-35 at least. A few years back Amazon was much better, I try to avoid them now.