Amazon Prime Air Promises 30 Minute Deliveries via Autonomous Drones

Look up in sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…an Amazon delivery drone! After promising last month to shake up the online retail industry by partnering with the U.S. Postal Service to offer Sunday deliveries, Amazon this weekend unveiled its plans to deploy autonomous delivery drones in the not-too-distant future.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos appeared Sunday on a 60 Minutes segment to discuss the idea, called “Amazon Prime Air.” He described a fleet of small autonomous drones that could deliver packages weighing up to five pounds to customers in selected areas as quickly as 30 minutes after the customer completes a purchase online.

Under the proposed plan, these small packages, which Mr. Bezos says comprise 86 percent of the company’s current shipments, would be processed at one of Amazon’s large fulfillment centers and automatically picked up by one of the drones. Using GPS and other navigation technologies, the drones would fly to the customer’s address, land outside the door, release the package, and then fly away.

The technology is already feasible, although key aspects still need to be worked out, such as determining if a customer’s address has an acceptable landing and drop-off location. There are also strict FAA regulations that must be modified to allow Amazon and other private companies to operate autonomous drones inside the U.S., a restriction that’s missing from other countries like Australia, where private companies are already implementing plans to use drones. But Amazon executives believe that the continued rise of drones will lead the FAA to ease restrictions as early as 2015, paving the way for skies filled with Amazon drones that will one day be “as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today.”