Amazon Starts Drone Deliveries In Arizona

Amazon is launching drone deliveries from its Tolleson, AZ, same-day delivery site, making over 50,000 essentials available to eligible customers in the West Valley Phoenix area. The Verge reports: The news came after Amazon announced it was shutting down its testing zone location in Lockeford, California. The new Tolleson location integrates drone deliveries into Amazon's delivery network for the first time, and the drones will deploy right next to the fulfillment center. Amazon is using its latest MK30 drones that can carry up to 5 pounds while also flying "twice as far" and running "50 percent quieter" than its previous models that sometimes crashed and burned in testing.

Amazon will launch the drones from its hybrid facility. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has approved Amazon's drones for Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS), meaning they can be flown out of visual range from the operator. The company claims it's the first to launch both a new facility and BVLOS drone service that meets FAA requirements.

Put up "Watch For Falling Drones" signs

[Rick Schumann]

Five bucks says some of them get shot out of the sky.

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[burtosis]

Skeet shooting with loot boxes!

Given that the loot boxes aren’t armored, I’m wagering casuals aren’t going to be good enough to get the drops very often.

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[nightflameauto]

Ten bucks says more than one Amazon employee gets maimed or killed by a flying Cuisinart.

Flying Cuisinart was my favorite punk band in the mid seventies.

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[Rick Schumann]

Berzerker barbarian on meth with a Ring of Flying?

What they're not telling you

[CEC-P]

You ever notice everyone chooses Arizona for testing all this new tech because the air temps, humidity, visibility, sundown times, etc are all very predictable and stable? That's why everyone demos self-driving cars there too. I can't wait until they "prove: that it "works perfectly" and then try this nonsense in the midwest or New York City in the winter. Good luck.

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[Darinbob]

Then test in Alabama to see how well it dodges bullets.

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[Rick Schumann]

Test it in India.

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[Rick Schumann]

Ice Road Truckers: EV Edition

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[ceoyoyo]

Everybody knows you should always start with the hardest problem. Dipshits a hundred years ago wussed out and put wheels on cars and now we don’t have any personal spaceships. Not even any antigravity landspeeders!

Well, this'll be fun:

[UncleTogie]

Amazon's apparently hosting the world's largest random package giveaway.

It's about time.

[RitchCraft]

People in AZ have been wanting to order drones for years now. Good on them.

It's a big drone

[ZipNada]

Looks to be about 7 feet in diameter with 6 propellers. I can't tell if it carries more than one package, but the video shows a box being inserted into the central body and then it gets ejected at the destination from what looks like ~20 feet off the ground. The box has special cushioning.

"The drone’s door glides open and the package is released onto the landing pad placed at the customer’s residence." Probably there is a QR code-like emblem on the pad that give the drone a target.

"An employee a

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[awwshit]

There is no way this scales to anything practical.

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[ZipNada]

I can see it being useful to make deliveries in rural areas where it would be a lot cheaper to fly a package out to someone's farmhouse than to send a truck there.

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[awwshit]

Hope the farm only needs one small thing at a time.

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[crow]

That looks like it's in the same class as Baba Yaga, which has proven to be a very successful delivery drone, though the delivery recipients have consistently been less than pleased with it.

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[Rick Schumann]

Probably there is a QR code-like emblem on the pad that give the drone a target.

Porch Pirates 2.0: cloning landing-pad QR codes. Put it in the bed of a pickup truck, wait for the idiot drone to drop the package, drive off with it, drone doesn't know the difference.