A dilemma hovers over the future of drone deliveries. How do you drop off a package in residential areas without inadvertently decapitating the garden gladioli or crushing the family cat? What of deliveries to apartment blocks? Or basement flats?
Amazon believes it can swoop past such worries. This week the ecommerce group cleared a regulatory hurdle in its bid to cut delivery times down from one day to a matter of minutes using drones. Seven years after boss Jeff Bezos said drones could be dropping off parcels at customers’ doors in “four, five years” it has yet to conduct even a test flight in its home market. The go-ahead from the US Federal Aviation Administration gives it the ability to do just that.
It is a pity that it has taken so long. Analysts, programmers and business executives have outdone each other with forecasts for how big the market for delivery-by-drone could be. Parcels could be delivered profitably for a fee of just $0.25 apiece, reckons Ark Invest. It envisages half of US ecommerce sales reaching buyers this way by 2030. Shipments of civil-use drones could double by 2022, says ABI Research, accelerated by coronavirus.