In a tweet Jeff Bezos announced that the first ever real life Amazon Prime Air delivery has taken place right here in the UK. Tweeting is a rare event for Jeff, this was his 78th tweet ever but it’s a momentous occasion even if currently only two Amazon customers in the world have access to Prime Air.
The first real delivery took place a week ago on the 7th of December and took just 13 minutes from the order being placed to the delivery of a Fire TV and some popcorn to Richard B, Prime Air’s first real life customer.
Although just two Prime Air customers exist at the moment, Amazon plan to up that to dozens of customers in the near future and rapidly expand into the hundreds. This is more than a proof of concept, this is real customers ordering real products and having them really delivered by drone.
First-ever #AmazonPrimeAir customer delivery is in the books. 13 min—click to delivery. Check out the video: https://t.co/Xl8HiQMA1S pic.twitter.com/5HGsmHvPlE
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) December 14, 2016
Fantasy stuff it may be, but for a few it’s become reality and with an Amazon warehouse just over the horizon Amazon Prime Air is delivering packages up to five pounds in 30 minutes or less using small drones. (I’m in awe that such a ground breaking service still uses imperial measurements – it looks like our US cousins haven’t bent to the diktat instructing us Brits to use the kilo.)
It’s worth emphasising that this is a fully autonomous flight. No human is directly controlling the drone and once it leaves the warehouse the delivery is full automated with no intervention required.
If you live in the Cambridgeshire area you could potentially be in line for an invite to become Prime Air’s 3rd customer.
8 Responses
I can see it being a lot faster than using Hermes and with the same delivery result – thrown over the back fence and left on the lawn, all it needs to do now is leave a card that says ‘left in your safe place’ and that’s hermes out of a contract, seriously what is the percentage of houses that can accept a drone delivery being honest, OK if you have a garden like the video but I also live in the country and around here at this time of year if it flies – they shoot it
that’s great Jeff – I opened a case with Amazon Seller Support on 6th Dec which has sat unanswered since then.
Can you send a drone out to the lone support agent you have left working for Amazon and ask them to take a look?
thanks – I appreciate it.
What utter tosh. Real customers with a landing pad do you mean? So I assume the service will remain unavailable to anyone who is unfortunate enough to live in a town or who doesn’t have a penthouse with a helipad.
What is to stop bored teenagers taking potshots at these drones with a BB gun, or simply throwing stones?
If this ridiculous scheme goes ahead, every single delivery will be intercepted and/or stolen. You’ve only got to look at what the scammers do now to get stuff for free – they are going to love this – it’s so much easier.
Only an American company could invent a delivery system where the parcel chucks itself over your fence.
Maybe they could focus on delivering their UK derived taxes instead.
nearly as daft as sticking them in folded cardboard and inserting then thru a hole in your door
They seem so keen to push on with this. I’m not sure it’s what we want.
I can see it working in the US where suburban houses have big lawns but here in yorkshire they will be shot down by farmers with some very strongly worded letters written about these eyesores and threat to wildlife/birds and aircraft. That’s even if they can stay airborne. Leeds airport has trouble staying open at this time of year because of the severe wind fog and snow.
Large companies often give us positive things previously only seen in sci fi but for me drones belong in the darker terminator 2 side of the future that we can do without.
There will not be anyone left with work in the world to buy anything off Amazon soon anyway for there “drones” to deliver, they will even have laid of their “self employed” slave labour force. POPCORN probably fed it to them also.
This could actually work where I live it is rural and plenty of room, in a UK town centre it could not.