Amazon Air, the Swiftest Form of Delivery

Amazon, a 70.8 billion dollar industry, has come up with a technological advance to deliver their products in a matter of minutes. It’s amazing that even having Amazon Prime, free two-day shipping, isn’t enough for customers.

Amazon was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos and its headquarters are based in Seattle, WA. They employ 14,000 people while attracting “tens of millions of Amazon.com customers” (Schneider). It first started out as an online bookstore then slowly attended to the shoppers needs. They expanded their products and became known for “popularizing online shopping” (Schneider).

Now that we are in the twenty-first century, it is pretty reasonable that Amazon advances some of their technology. No, they didn’t create robots to come to your doorstep, but they did create drones to drop off your purchased items. They are calling it Amazon Prime Air delivery. The drones are made to fit each region of the world so drones in Alaska and Hawaii would look and be made completely different. Their goal is for customers to receive their package in no more than thirty minutes and to increase the safety of the package during transportation.

The first Amazon Prime Air delivery was made in the UK to a man who purchased an Amazon Fire TV stick and a bag of popcorn. It is not legal in the United States yet to fly drones so they are testing through the British government. Only two people have used this method of delivery but it will soon reach hundreds. So far, Amazon Prime Air hasn’t charged any more for this method of transportation.

The way it works is the person ordering has a launch pad that the drone is able to track. The purchased items are packaged and ready to ship, and then they are loaded into the drones’ claws ready for flight. The packages have to weigh five or less pounds and the weather has to be pleasant in order for the delivery to happen. As the self-driving drone takes off from Amazon’s warehouse, it is tracking the launch pad and is on its way. The first delivery by air took thirteen minutes to complete.

Once Amazon is ready to use the drones completely, there will be more warehouses built to reach all the customers it can. As of now, it can only reach up to ten miles.

There are also other companies which have tried using drones as their delivery method. Domino’s has delivered pizza by drone in New Zealand, Chipotle burritos have been delivered by drone to Virginia Tech, and Starbucks has even been approached to start delivering by air.

All this to say, Amazon may not have flying cars, but they have just started to introduce flying robots, and that’s a close second.
https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Prime-Air/b?ie=UTF8&node=8037720011
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com
https://www.thebalance.com/amazon-com-company-research-2071316
http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/14/technology/amazon-drone-delivery/
http://wavy.com/2016/12/18/1-small-delivery-for-a-man-1-giant-leap-for-amazon-drones/