Amazon is working on a new way to get packages to customers in 30 minutes or less — via a self-guided drone. The so-called Prime Air unmanned aircraft project will require incredible, high-flying technology and the clearance of the Federal Aviation Administration before it takes off. Don’t hold your breath!
While we love the idea of half-hour delivery, here’s why the idea doesn’t stand a chance in Amazon’s home town of Seattle — or our surrounding Northwest communities.
1. Rain, rain, rain. “Your drone was drenched in a Seattle downpour” is as lame an excuse for soaking wet packages as “my drone ate my homework.”
2. Tall trees. We’ve got some of the largest evergreen specimens on the planet. Is Amazon planning to shoot down my copy of The Hunger Games with a Katniss Everdeen bow and arrow, or employ an army of arborists to climb to the highest branches to retrieve packages and then hang-glide back down?
3. Eagles. Our proudest American birds will start feathering their nests with iPhones and other shiny objects just as soon as the first drone takes flight. Other birds may also be implicated. “My iPad-Mini just got “Sea-hawked.”
4. Dog poaching. Without doorbell alerts, unattended packages will meet the same fate as the ones tossed on my porch stoop now. Namely our dog’s playfulness. Every package ceremoniously delivered by flying bot to this corner of Dogpatch, U.S.A. will get roundly chewed and dragged off into the bushes.
5. Bad haircuts. Put eight spinning blades in “hover-mode” over the coiffed high brows of the average Seattle hipster and they’ll look as if they just made an emergency exit from Great Clips.
6. The Seahawks “Secondary.” Those “Free Safeties”can intercept anything in the air that crosses the fifty yard line at Century Link Field. Picking off Amazon drones will become a new contact sport like Hogwart’s Quiddich.
7. Bumbershoots. Suddenly your umbrella has become a life-saving drone shield. Only you’ll need to carry it with you every time you go out, even when it’s not raining.
8. Oil prices. What kind of gas mileage does your average octo-copter get? Or are we talking about the lithium cobalt oxide batteries used to toast Baked Alaska on the early Boeing 787?
9. Noise pollution. Our neighborhood already sounds like a saw mill from the fire wood “ripping” that goes on from dawn ’til dusk. Do we really need “chopper SFX” to disturb our afternoon meditation?
10. Return trips. If Amazon is allowed to target my front porch with a door prize, why can’t I send back my ill-fitting swim suit via my own hover craft? Besides, on the return flight all incoming drones will be converging on the same landing zone. That means they will all crash directly into each other with GPS precision, wiping out the entire fleet with a giant “boom” over Lake Union. Ironically, just a few steps away from the Jeff Bezos Center for Innovation. [24×7]
Larry Sivitz is the managing editor of Seattle24x7.
