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?