'Twas the Night Before Christmas

If I ask you to close your eyes for a minute and think about presents being delivered to your door on Christmas Eve you will probably conjure up an image something like this. A Nordic sleigh, packed to the gunnels with neatly wrapped gifts, pulled by a team of flying reindeer, and driven by a cheery bespectacled old gentleman, clad head to toe in red and white furs.

Far below lies a snowy winter landscape with lights twinkling around the village green.  Inside the houses the children have gone to bed but are too excited to get to sleep.

That is the traditional image, but it looks set to change.  This year is going to be the biggest year yet for online Christmas shopping.  It is convenient and easy, but it has led to a massive increase in road traffic as an army of independent delivery companies vie for the lucrative business.  Most of the time the system works well.  I live in the middle of nowhere, but the van drivers are happy to deliver to my door.  On one or two occasions I have placed an online order at 9:00 in the evening, and been woken up at 8:00 the next morning as the parcel is delivered. That is great service.

Now online retail giant Amazon is upping the ante.  It is already way too easy to purchase goods on Amazon, and they are dedicated to making it even easier for us customers and much more profitable for them.  The latest idea is to replace the road-bound vans with a fleet of high-tech unmanned flying delivery drones.

The vision for the new service, called Amazon Prime Air, is to get packages to customers in 30 minutes or less, and Amazon wants to roll it out to all their customers worldwide as soon as possible.  Unbelievable as it may sound, the technology to do this is not Science Fiction.  It already exists, admittedly primarily for military purposes at present, and the biggest obstacles to bringing it online as a commercial enterprise will be to overcome security and safety issues and persuade governments and aviation authorities around the world to grant operating  licences. 

The drones are also known as SUAs, or Small, Unmanned Aircraft Systems.  In the USA, Congress and the Federal Aviation Authority want to see them integrated into the existing national airspace system and operating commercially as soon as possible.  Amazon has a research laboratory in Seattle which is working on turning the vision into reality.  

According to Paul Misener, Amazon’s Vice President of Global Public Policy in an open letter to the FAA, advances made there over the last year include

• Testing a range of capabilities for our eighth and ninth generation aerial vehicles, including agility, flight duration, redundancy, and sense and avoid sensors and algorithms
• Developing aerial vehicles that travel over 50 miles per hour, and will carry 5 pound payloads, which cover 86% of products sold on Amazon
• Attracting a growing team of world-renowned roboticists, scientists, aeronautical engineers, remote sensing experts, and a former NASA astronaut.

Currently, due to FAA rules and regulations, Amazon Prime Air is limited to testing their drones indoors or outside of the USA, and they are seeking permission to have these rules relaxed.  This is a bit worrying, given recent reports I have seen in the US press of near-collisions and other dangerous encounters caused by drones.  According to the Washington Post

Since June 1, commercial airlines, private pilots and air-traffic controllers have alerted the FAA to 25 episodes in which small drones came within a few seconds or a few feet of crashing into much larger aircraft

Now Amazon is moving some or its Prime Air R&D operations to the UK. If you happen to be an experienced flight test engineer or a research scientist living in the Cambridge area, there are job opportunities for you.  If you are an innocent passer-by: wear a safety helmet! Santa and his reindeer are not the only air traffic that you are likely to encounter as you stagger home from the pub on Christmas Eve.

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!