What about 20-50 lb flying machines falling onto sidewalks, roofs, and streets?

You don't see amateur RC aviation enthusiasts flying their model airplanes in the middle of the city, and I sure as hell don't want to see a corporation doing this on an industrial scale.

Why not ground-based drone delivery?

That drone is pretty big, and they're getting extra lift out of the wings which conveniently double as prop guards. Flight time is presumably at least an hour, if it can get something to a customer in half an hour (and has to get back). You'd need quite a few since each drone can therefore only make around 10-20 deliveries a day if they swap out the batteries when it lands. 30 mile round trip range is pretty decent. Also on size - you need somewhere to land it with a few metres wriggle room either side. There's no way that's going into a built up area.

There's no point doing drone delivery in urban environments, the safety case is insane and you're competing with excellent existing delivery channels.

My guess personally, is that drone delivery will ultimately just be a tool for a self driving truck to get the package from the truck to the door. Drones are not nearly good enough as it stands today to do end to end deliveries at an industrial scale outside of maybe a few rural areas.

But also, no. Not the same people.

[0] https://www.faa.gov/about/plans_reports/congress/media/fy17_...

So, to the extent the Boeing 737 MAX team is not reviewing Amazon's applications, no, not the same people.

If you look at the first FAA waivers to operate drones industrially -- 5 years ago! -- you will notice that all of the approved drones are military drones. Why military drones? Because the approved drones often had a decade or more of operational use in explicitly hostile environments and very poorly controlled conditions. Being able to reliably operate in those conditions was considered strong evidence they were unlikely to start falling out of the sky when operated under much better controlled environments and less risky conditions.

The challenge for many new drone builders is that their platforms are not built anywhere close to the reliability and resilience standards of military drone systems, which are typical the product of companies with proven aviation/avionics systems engineering experience and bankrolled by US defense spending. Even when they build systems that on paper meet this level of engineering, the lack of operational history and experience puts these drones on the slow path to approval.

Amazon getting the FAA to sign off on industrial use of an exotic drone airframe with no operational history strongly suggests that its safety and resilience characteristics are excellent, at least comparable to drones designed to survive military environments.

Risks: See everything else

Do you really, like I mean _really_ need your stuff from Amazon same day, hours after ordering it? No, you really don't. Nobody does. It's a convenience, a nice-to-have, but is totally unnecessary.

So, I think the burden of proof lays squarely on Amazon and it's proponents of this type of service, to prove beyond any reasonable doubt the risks can be mitigated to the point where the public accepts them as a trade-off.

Having potentially 50lbs of drone fall on your car while you're driving home from work is probably not going to be acceptable... to name just one risk that will have to be proven to be minimized. Or noise levels will be controlled near neighborhoods etc... Other industries have to prove their new thing is safe and acceptable for the public... why should Amazon be any different?

The same could be asked of 2-day home-delivery 20 years back, or 2-day world-travel 200 years back. Yet, here we are.

If necessity is the mother of invention, laziness is the father.

Has this faith been shaken by the recent 737 Max issues?

The last thing I want is to add to the power lines, airplanes, etc. with the visual noise when I'm on my deck trying to enjoy nature.

Further, Amazon is a major player in the advertising space now. I'd be surprised if at some point these weren't leveraged to display ads in some format. I'm a marketer by trade, but personally that's a line I don't want crossed.

Also now we have a century worth of experience to apply to deciding to add new vehicles to our environment.

And finally for the most part cars, trucks etc are primarily fixed routes - roads. We know where they are, there's planning and committees around design and disruption before they are set in place.

Drones move in a 3 dimensional space, with no set routes, and very few no fly zones.

Basically imagine a moped that can fly over your property or circle where you live looking for an address.

Not to even mention the privacy issues, most cars are still lacking in cameras, or scanning technology. Delivery drones will need that stuff to be standard.

Then don't look up in a couple of years when SpaceX has HUNDREDS of satellites ruining the night sky.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/science/starlink-spacex-a...

I foresee ads for rakes when Amazon notices that there are lots of leaves in my yard.

I don't know why people think this is a good thing right now.

I would gladly trade the inconvenience of not being immediately aware of rake-buying opportunities for privacy and peace of mind.

RC Helis 60 Size Gas back in the old days. You had to manually control everything. You had to built it from scratch. [1] The ones they have now are so simple and easy they are no fun at all. I wonder if you feel the same way?

I am still not getting how this is possible given weather conditions and variability.

[1] Electric? Only thing like that I ever saw was at the hobby shop (remember those) and it had a power cord attached and was plugged into an extension cord and being tested out back.

Thats exactly what I'm trying to do here (sort of), I'm like 2 years in on the project and I've only just begun to actually test the thing. https://github.com/castis/currant

No wonder they chose to play classical music over this video.

But to be fair, the frequencies are quite different.

This is orders of magnitude less noise than 20 drones, coming and going, throughout the day. (Not to mention the ones passing overhead, to deliver to the next block down...)

When was the last time a UPS truck drove over your house / apartment / etc?

Mind if I ask where the law comes from? I'm assuming that you're talking about the United States - is this a federal/state/local law?