Not So Fast: Experts Say Amazon Drones Aren't Likely Anytime Soon

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By Todd Wasserman2013-12-02 22:00:41 UTC

Let's take a trip to the holidays in 2018. The air is humming, not with Christmas cheer, but with the gnawing buzz of Amazon's delivery drones.

Though greeted enthusiastically by the public at first, opinion began to turn when a drone veered off-course and smashed into someone's windshield, causing a 16-car pile-up and several deaths. Then, in a case in Des Moines, a grandmother was felled by an errant drone that smacked her in the back of the head, prompting her to spill forward and causing irreversible damage to her frontal cortex.

See also: 19 Tweets That Will Make You Think Differently About Amazon's Drones

It's not all bad, though. The drones have ushered in what could be a new holiday tradition: Kids shoot down the drones with BB guns, netting free holiday gifts.

Those are just a few potential scenarios that could keep Amazon Prime Air, the company's proposed fleet of unmanned delivery aircraft, grounded for the foreseeable future. Industry experts say there are more concerns as well, including the glacial pace of the Federal Aviation Administration, limited battery life, the lack of a delivery infrastructure and other challenges ranging from birds to weather to hackers.

"I think it's a publicity stunt, to be honest," says Dean Wynton, director of Aerosight, which makes drones used for aerial photography. Wynton isn't alone.

"The consensus is that this is a joke," says Rory Paul, CEO of Volt Aerial Robotics, which makes drones for farmers' use. "It would be more feasible if he said he was using robotic trucks and cars."

Even Michael Toscano, president and CEO of The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, an industry advocacy group, thinks that Bezos's vision of employing such a fleet up in four or five years is a wee bit sanguine. "It's OK to be optimistic," Toscano says. "Could it happen in four to five years? Sure, if everything worked out and everyone pulled together and there was unlimited money behind it ... What [Bezos] was proposing was an end state."

As the industry insiders note, it's not that Bezos's proposal is impossible, but rather that a drone package delivery system raises so many issues that it appears unfeasible, at least in the next five years. On the technical side, the current battery life for such aircraft — 20 to 30 minutes — presents one major challenge. Bezos has proposed that deliveries be restricted to within 10 miles of a fulfillment center, but Wynton says that such a GPS-controlled device could only go as far as two or three miles on that sort of charge.

Bezos hasn't disclosed how fast one his drones would go, but a comparable model from Ermes Technologies hits a speed of 42 miles per hour, which would give an Amazon Prime Air drone enough time to go 10 miles and back without much room for error, wind resistance or the drag caused by the weight of a package.

Another issue is establishing and maintaining a secure wireless connection. Such GPS-controlled drones can easily be subject to "spoofing" — giving it the wrong coordinates — by hackers. The FAA has not started to address the topic of spoofing, but it hasn't addressed much else, either. In February 2012, Congress ordered the FAA to write rules that would cover the commercial use of drones by 2015, but that was before sequestration and a government shutdown, two factors that, along with a lack of expertise related to the legal issues raised by such aircraft, have made that date unlikely. As a recent Wall Street Journal article noted, "full-blown certification of drones" isn't slated until 2020.

In the meantime, Amazon can address several other issues. For instance, public safety. Assuming a drone isn't spoofed, it could run into an unforeseen object like a bird or a human. Volt CEO Paul, for instance, notes that the carbon fiber blades on his aircraft could "seriously hurt" someone who collided with one.

"How do they detect children playing in a yard?" he asks. Toscano says that's a valid question, as is the issue of where exactly the Amazon drones would land.

Toscano believes that a human would have to guide the landing by sight. At that point, "it could get hit by a car or a dog could bite it or someone could steal it," he says. Toscano speculates that in the future, homeowners could employ an "Amazon box" that would let a drone drop off a package and then lock a panel behind it to prevent theft. (Of course, since Bezos's idea refers to a delivery within 30 minutes, it's assumed that a homeowner would be there to receive the package.)

Finally, with an estimated value in the five digits (Volt's Octane quadcopters go for $10,770 each), Amazon's drones could themselves also present irresistible targets for criminals or amateur marksmen with BB guns.

Despite these potential roadblocks, Toscano says that Bezos's vision can eventually be achieved — over time. He described the process as "crawl, walk, run." Bezos, he says, has fast-forwarded to the run part, overlooking years of slow, incremental change. His compares it to the wireless industry, which crawled along for years. "

You look at 2000 and a phone looked like a brick," he says. "Now, it's pretty good. It took 14 years to get to where we are now."

Mashable composite. Images: Flickr Aaron Fulkerson; iStockphoto, 4x6

Topics: amazon, Business, Drones, jeff bezos, U.S., World