The Fedex courier in my area has been consistently bad for years and doesn't get fired. Two weeks ago: doesn't come, doesn't leave a notice, two days in a row, claiming he came, I had a to exchange some salty emails with customer service to get my package. Each time I had to use Fedex these last 3 years I've had to do this cycle.

On the other hand I have developped a "good relationship" with the UPS courier.

The thing is, people like you and me are not primary customers of Fedex. Corporate is where it's at - when I worked at an oil refinery in Scotland, engineers would request parts that had to be literally delivered ASAP, and refinery didn't think twice about paying a bill in thousands of pounds for overnight delivery of few parts from US.

As a logistics manager - I would constantly switch between the two, depending on who could get me the best rate for our most common small package parcel sizes, etc.

They constantly alternate between "the best" and "shitty".

I live in quite a remote area, with UPS and FedEx drivers that are driving hundreds of miles per day on their route, often starting over 100 miles away, and yet they're both consistently excellent. They virtually never miss delivery estimates, and often exceed them. I'm honestly quite impressed with them, especially considering a moderate amount of their route is also on fairly poor quality dirt roads.

I still "trust" FedEx as a company, but the delivery man in charge of my area is sh*t.

I have the EXACT OPPOSITE experience in my neighthood - FedEx always deliver package above and beyond but UPS has been shitty ALL THE TIME. I live in Northen NJ.

It is really FedEx who organizes that, or the air controllers in Memphis dealing with pilots directly?

I'm a licensed pilot. What's interesting about that video has literally nothing to do with Fedex. It's a demonstration of the skill of the center and approach controllers at Memphis during inclement weather.

I know. I get that -- I think my point was more to demonstrate that FedEx is an airline first - logistics company 2nd - in terms of air freight.

What's stopping Amazon doing the same thing over the next few years? They have the resources to buy some planes and write some software to schedule them. The hard thing would be negotiating with airports to get the same level of access that FedEx enjoys. I don't see what that would be a particularly big problem - it comes down to the fees they're willing to pay.

I don't see the point of that video.

a) If anything, it is not a feat of Company, but of nowadays IFR systems in cooperation with ATC guys who probably sweated off at least 10 pounds during that shift.

b) Each and every airline does that, from top notch VIP charters to those we-are-declaring-emergency-because-our-company-doesn't-let-us-take-in-enough-fuel-so-we-are-landing-RIGHT-NOW-GET-OFF-OUR-WAY poor souls piloting Ryanairs.

c) Aviation is a market. If you pay, you get aircrafts and pilots. If you pay good, you get good pilots. That's it.

d) This is very inside the box thinking. An equivalent of this would be showing a video of a bunch of guys running to the local hardware shop, hastily throwing HW boxes into a car, driving fast and furious back to the site, assembling a server, plugging it in, installing OS and presenting it to the customer: here, your server. So Amazon can beat them only when they can do all of this on demand? No, they just built the AWS and "on demand" now means just clicking "I want an instance now" or even letting a balancer spin that up for you, done.

The article is talking about 15 years horizon and although that is a very brave speculation of Amazon's business plans and future events, just think about what 15 years means. 15 years ago, Windows XP has just RTMed a week before. GPS meant some ugly expensive box waiting an eternity to get a fix. Common large and heavy desktop crates called personal computers struggled with even playing a DivX video in CRT resolution. Capturing overhead footage meant flying an expensive helicopter running on expensive fuel and operated by highly trained pilot. Nowadays, you can buy an entire device called "quadcopter" for less than an hour of helicopter flight time and fly around and videotape everything like in a computer game. We have small slates of glass called "smartphones" that smoothly play 2880x2160 videos while projecting them onto a 3D surface twice (VR phone-based headsets) or even smoothly render an entire VR game scene from polygons. We have cars using half as much fuel. You can tap on your slate of glass and a car arrives for you.

In 15 years we can have supertough drones flying right through hurricanes, micro hyperloops moving small cargo around entire states, warehouses on every other corner with duplicated stock, carpooling packet delivery services like some Uber-Fedex hybrid, or even outright cargo teleports spitting out pizzas from local restaurants, shoe orders from Amazon and hell monsters from Mars military bases with id Software calling out software patents on that and claiming intellectual property on 50% of incoming daemons...

Sorry for long post - basically what I wanted to say is that everybody can do that with airplanes.

Thanks for your post - I appreciate the constructive criticism - and agree the video isn't much to anyone with an aviation background.

I guess what I was trying to say, is that if you are an air-<whatever> business, you ALWAYS have to be an airline first - with all the Regulatory, Union, personnel, hardware, etc issues that come with it - and whatever else you want to do SECOND (air freight, passenger etc).

You know waaaaay more than I do - this is just my oversimplified take I am sure. I just am always impressed at the stakes / volume of traffic that goes in / out of the FDX hubs daily.

algorithms are way better at controlling traffic than humans. what you're seeing is just the best so far

needs more 64kbps mp3 audio.