Exactly a decade ago, Amazon unveiled a program that aimed to revolutionize shopping and shipping. Drones launched from a central hub would take to the skies delivering almost anything anyone could need. They would be fast, innovative and ubiquitous – all the hallmarks of Amazon.
The buzzing announcement, made by Jeff Bezos in “60 Minutes” as part of a Cyber Monday promotional package, it attracted worldwide attention. “I know this sounds like science fiction. It’s not,” said Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO at the time. The drones would be “ready to enter commercial operations as soon as the necessary regulations are established,” probably in 2015. the company said.
Eight more years later, drone delivery is a reality, more or less, outside of College Station, Texas, northwest of Houston. This is a significant achievement for a program that has had ups and downs over the years and has lost many of its early leaders to newer, more urgent projects.
However, the company as it currently exists is so disappointing that Amazon can only keep drones in the air by giving things away. Years of work by top scientists and aviation specialists have resulted in a program that sends Listerine fresh mint breath strips or a can of Campbell’s Minestrone Chunky with Italian sausage, but not both at the same time, to customers like gift. If this is science fiction, it’s played for laughs.
A decade is an eternity in technology, but still, drone delivery doesn’t come close to the scale or simplicity of Amazon’s original promotional videos. This gap between dazzling claims and mundane reality happens all the time in Silicon Valley. Self-driving cars, the metaverse, flying cars, robots, neighborhoods or even cities built from scratch, virtual universities that can compete with Harvard, artificial intelligence: the list of delayed and incomplete promises is long.
“Having ideas is easy,” said Rodney Brooks, a robotics entrepreneur and frequent critic of tech companies’ hype. “Making them a reality is difficult. Getting them implemented at scale is even more difficult.”
Amazon said last month that drone deliveries would expand to Britain, Italy and another unnamed US city. by the end of 2024. However, even at the threshold of growth, one question remains. Now that drones finally exist in at least a limited form, why did we think we needed them in the first place?
Dominique Lord and Leah Silverman live in the College Station drone zone. They are fans of Amazon and place regular orders for ground delivery. Drones are another matter, although the service is free for Amazon Prime members. While it’s great to have things literally in your driveway, at least the first few times, there are a lot of obstacles to getting things this way.
Only one item can be delivered at a time. It cannot weigh more than five pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something that can break since the drone drops it from 12 feet. Drones can’t fly when it’s too hot, too windy, or too rainy.
You must be home to locate the landing target and make sure a porch pirate doesn’t take your item or roll out into the street (which once happened to Mr. Lord and Mrs. Silverman). . But your car can’t be in the driveway. Letting the drone land in the backyard would avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees.
Amazon also warned customers that drone delivery is not available during periods of high demand for drone delivery.
The other active testing site in the United States is Lockeford, California, in the Central Valley. On a recent afternoon, the Lockeford site seemed practically moribund, with only three cars in the parking lot. Amazon said it would make drone deliveries in Lockeford and arranged for a New York Times reporter to return to the site. He also arranged an interview with David Carbon, the former Boeing executive who heads the drone program. The company later canceled both without explanation.
A corporate blog post on Oct. 18 said drones had safely delivered “hundreds” of household items to College Station since December, and that customers there could now receive some medications. Lockeford was not mentioned.
After Silverman and Lord expressed initial interest in the drone program, Amazon offered $100 in gift certificates in October 2022 to continue. But its service did not begin until June and was then suspended during a harsh heat wave when the drones were unable to fly.
However, the incentives kept coming. The couple received an email the other day from Amazon promoting Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter, which usually costs $5.38 but was a “free gift” while supplies last. They ordered it and shortly after a drone dropped a large box containing a small jar. Amazon said that “some promotional items” are offered “as a welcome.”
“We don’t really need anything they offer for free,” said Silverman, a 51-year-old novelist and caregiver. “Drones feel more like a toy than anything else: a toy that wastes a huge amount of paper and cardboard.”
Texas weather wreaks havoc on important deliveries. Lord, a 54-year-old civil engineering professor at Texas A&M, ordered medication by mail. When he retrieved the package, the drugs had melted. He is hopeful that drones can eventually solve problems like this.
“I still view this program positively knowing that it is in the experimental phase,” he said.
Amazon says drones will get better over time. It announced a new model, the MK30, last year and posted photos in October. The MK30, which is scheduled to begin service in late 2024, was touted as having greater range, the ability to fly in adverse weather conditions and a 25 percent reduction in “perceived noise.”
When Amazon started working on drones years ago, it took the retailer two or three days to ship many items to customers. It worried about being vulnerable to potential competitors whose suppliers were more local, including Google and eBay. Drones were all about speed.
“We can deliver in half an hour,” Bezos promised on “60 Minutes.”
For a while, drones were the next big thing. Google developed its own drone service, Wing, which now works with Walmart to deliver items in parts of Dallas and Frisco, Texas. Startups got funding, with about $2.5 billion invested between 2013 and 2019, according to Teal Group, an aerospace consultancy. The veteran venture capitalist Tim Draper said in 2013 that “everything from pizza delivery to personal shopping can be handled by drones.” Uber Eats announced a food delivery drone at the end of 2019. The future was in the air.
Amazon started thinking very long term. He envisioned and obtained a patent for a drone refueling vehicle that would float in the sky at 45,000 feet. That’s above commercial airplanes, but Amazon said it could use the vehicles to deliver customers a hot dinner.
However, on the ground, progress was slow, sometimes for technical reasons and sometimes due to the company’s corporate DNA. The same aggressive trust that created a trillion-dollar business undermined Amazon’s efforts to work with the Federal Aviation Administration.
“The attitude was: ‘We’re Amazon. We’ll convince the FAA,’” said a former Amazon drone executive, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the topic. “The FAA wants companies to come with great humility and great transparency. That is not a strength of Amazon.”
A more complicated issue was getting the technology to the point where it was secure not just most of the time but all of the time. The first drone to land on someone’s head, or take off holding a cat, sets the show back another decade, especially if it’s filmed.
“Part of the DNA of the tech industry is that you can achieve things you never thought you could,” said Neil Woodward, who spent four years as a senior manager in Amazon’s drone program. “But the truth is that the laws of physics don’t change.”
Woodward, now retired, spent years at NASA in the astronaut program before moving into the private sector.
“When you work for the government, you have 535 people on your board of directors” – he was referring to Congress – “and a good part of them want to take away your funding because they have other priorities,” he said. “That makes government agencies very risk-averse. At Amazon they give you a lot of rope, but you can go out on top of your skis.”
In the end, there has to be a market. As Woodward put it, using an old Silicon Valley cliché: “Do dogs like dog food? “Sometimes dogs don’t do it.”
Archie Conner, 82, lives a few doors down from Mr. Lord and Mrs. Silverman. He sees drones as less of a retail innovation and more of a marketing innovation.
“When you hear a drone, you naturally think of Amazon. It’s really innovative thinking, even if no one places any orders,” she stated. “Drones were in the news the other day. People say, ‘Wow, Amazon did that.'”
Mr. Conner also asked for free Skippy peanut butter, but he forgot to set the landing target, so the drone flew away. He then he ordered it again. Meanwhile, an Amazon delivery man showed up with the first jar. Now he and his wife, Belinda, have two jars.
“We haven’t found much that we really want to pay for,” Conner said. “But we’ve enjoyed the free peanut butter.”
