Exactly a decade ago, Amazon unveiled a program aimed at revolutionizing shopping and shipping. Drones launched from a central hub would float through the sky, delivering almost anything anyone might need. They would be fast, innovative, ubiquitous – all the hallmarks of Amazon.
Jeff Bezos’ loud announcement on “60 Minutes” as part of a Cyber Monday advertising package drew worldwide attention. “I know this seems like science fiction. That’s not the case,” said Mr. Bezos, Amazon founder and then-chief executive. The drones will be “ready for commercial use as soon as the necessary regulations are in place,” probably in 2015, the company said.
Eight more years later, drone delivery is practically a reality on the outskirts of College Station, Texas, northwest of Houston. That’s a big win for a program that has floundered over the years, losing many of its early leaders to newer and more pressing projects.
But the venture in its current form is so disappointing that Amazon can only keep the drones in the air by giving things away. Years of work by top scientists and aviation specialists have produced a program that sends gifts of Listerine Cool Mint Breath Strips or a can of Campbell’s Chunky Minestrone with Italian sausage – but not both at the same time – to customers. If this is science fiction, it’s just for fun.
A decade is an eternity in technology, and yet drone delivery doesn’t come close to the scale or simplicity of Amazon’s original promotional videos. This gap between colorful claims and everyday 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 rival Harvard, artificial intelligence – the list of late and incomplete promises is long.
“Having ideas is easy,” said Rodney Brooks, a robotics entrepreneur and frequent critic of the hype around tech companies. “Translating them into reality is difficult. It’s even more difficult to deploy them on a large scale.”
Amazon said last month that drone deliveries would expand to the United Kingdom, Italy and another unidentified city in the United States by the end of 2024. But even on the threshold of growth, one question remains unanswered. Now that drones are finally around, at least in limited form, why did we even think we needed them?
Dominique Lord and Leah Silverman live in the drone zone of College Station. They are Amazon fans and regularly place orders for ground delivery. Drones are another matter, even though the service is free for Amazon Prime members. While it’s cool to have stuff literally end up on the driveway, at least the first few times, there are a lot of hurdles to getting stuff this way.
Only one item can be delivered at a time. It must not weigh more than five pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be anything fragile since the drone will drop it from a height of 12 feet. The drones cannot fly if it is too hot, too windy or too rainy.
You need to be home to place the landing target and to make sure a porch pirate doesn’t get away with your item or it doesn’t roll into the street (which happened to Mr. Lord and Ms. Silverman once). . But your car can’t be left in the driveway. Landing the drone in the backyard could avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees there.
Amazon has also warned customers that drone delivery is not possible during times of high demand.
The other active U.S. testing site is Lockeford, California, in the Central Valley. On a recent afternoon, the Lockeford location appeared largely run-down, with only three cars in the parking lot. Amazon said it was using drones to deliver in Lockeford and arranged for a New York Times reporter to return to the site. An interview was also arranged with David Carbon, the former Boeing executive who leads the drone program. The company later terminated both without giving reasons.
An Oct. 18 company blog post said drones had safely delivered “hundreds” of household items in College Station since December and that customers there could now get some medications delivered. Lockeford was not mentioned.
After Ms. Silverman and Mr. Lord expressed initial interest in the drone program, Amazon offered $100 gift cards in October 2022 to make it happen. However, their service only began in June and was then halted during a severe heatwave when the drones were unable to fly.
However, the incentives kept coming. The couple recently received an email from Amazon about Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter, which normally costs $5.38 but was a “free gift” while supplies lasted. They ordered it, and a short time later a drone dropped a large box containing a small jar. Amazon said “some promotional items” would be offered “as a welcome gift.”
“We don’t really need everything they offer for free,” said Ms. Silverman, a 51-year-old writer and caregiver. “The drones feel more like a toy than anything else – a toy that wastes a lot of paper and cardboard.”
Weather in Texas is impacting critical supplies. Mr. Lord, a 54-year-old civil engineering professor at Texas A&M, ordered a drug by mail. When he retrieved the package, the medication had melted. He hopes that drones will eventually be able to overcome such problems.
“I still view this program positively, knowing that it is in the experimental phase,” he said.
Amazon says its drones will improve over time. Last year a new model, the MK30, was announced and images were released in October. The MK30, due to enter service in late 2024, was credited with greater range, the ability to fly in poor weather and a 25 percent reduction in “perceived noise.”
When Amazon started working on drones years ago, it took the retailer two to three days to ship many items to customers. There were fears that the company was vulnerable to potential competitors whose suppliers were more local, including Google and eBay. Drones were all about speed.
“We can do a half-hour delivery,” Mr. Bezos promised on “60 Minutes.”
For a while, drones were the next big thing. Google developed its own drone service, Wing, which is now working with Walmart to deliver items in parts of Dallas and Frisco, Texas. Startups received funding – about $2.5 billion was invested between 2013 and 2019, according to Teal Group, an aerospace consulting firm. Veteran venture capitalist Tim Draper said in 2013 that “everything from pizza delivery to personal shopping can be done with drones.” Uber Eats announced a food delivery drone End of 2019. The future was in the air.
Amazon really started to think long-term. It envisioned and received a patent for a drone resupply vehicle that would hover in the sky at 45,000 feet. That’s more than commercial aircraft, but Amazon said it could use the vehicles to deliver a hot dinner to customers.
But on the ground, progress has been slow, sometimes for technical reasons and sometimes because of the company’s corporate DNA. The same aggressive confidence that spawned a trillion-dollar business undermined Amazon’s efforts to work with the Federal Aviation Administration.
“The attitude was, ‘We’re Amazon.’ “We will convince the FAA,” said a former Amazon drone executive who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the issue. “The FAA wants companies to act with great humility and great transparency. This is not Amazon’s strength.”
A more complicated task 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 a person’s head or take off with a cat in its arms sets the show back another decade, especially if it’s filmed.
“Part of the DNA of the tech industry is that you can do 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.”
Mr. Woodward, now retired, spent years in the astronaut program at NASA before moving into the private sector.
“When you work for the government, you have 535 people on your board” — he was referring to Congress — “and a large portion of them want to take away your funding because they have other priorities,” he said. “This makes government agencies very risk-averse. You get a lot of rope on Amazon, but you can get out on skis.”
In the end there has to be a market. As Mr. Woodward put it, using an old Silicon Valley cliche: “Do the dogs like the dog food?” Sometimes the dogs don’t.”
Archie Conner, 82, lives a few doors down from Mr. Lord and Ms. Silverman. He sees drones less as a retail innovation and more as a marketing innovation.
“When you hear a drone, you naturally think of Amazon. It’s real out-of-the-box thinking, even if no one orders at all,” he said. “Drones were in the news recently. People say, ‘Wow, Amazon did that.'”
Mr. Conner also ordered the free Skippy peanut butter, but forgot to mark the landing target, so the drone disappeared. Then he ordered it again. In the meantime, an Amazon delivery person showed up with the first jar. Now he and his wife Belinda have two glasses.
“We didn’t find much that we really wanted to pay for,” Mr. Conner said. “But we enjoyed the free peanut butter.”