We’ve been pretty excited about the idea of getting online shopping delivered by air ever since Amazon started talking about its drone delivery service last year. The idea behind the project, named Prime Air by Amazon CEO Jeff Bizos earlier this year, was to have orders delivered in 30 minutes or less by using an army of unmanned aerial vehicles (AKA drones) to do the heavy lifting.

While Amazon doesn’t deliver every item it sells to South Africa, it’s one of those “the future is now” sort of ideas that really captured our imagination and which we hoped would truly take off in the States and Europe.

But the project has hit a legal snag, and a major one at that. The Guardian in the UK has reported that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the USA, the governmental body that regulates things like what is and isn’t allowed to fly through public, private and military airspace, has ruled that delivery-by-drone is just too dangerous. That means no drone army for Amazon, or any other ecommerce bigwig dropping off online purchases by air.

Laws must change

The US and South Africa aren’t all that different when it comes to drone use and the law: neither country has laws that specifically govern the use of drones for commercial purposes, as confirmed by the South African Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) in a recent article we ran questioning the legalities surrounding drone use locally.

That’s a problem that will ultimately be solved, but as the CAA told htxt.africa, “this would take a while as [the CAA] looked at safety issues and security for national key points and so on.” Translation: don’t expect it anytime soon.

The Guardian article said that the FAA “would revisit the commercial application of small drones later this year, with potential new rules in place perhaps by the end of 2015.”

Clearly, it’s an ongoing process for the US as well, so Amazon’s dreams of airborne 30-minute deliveries are not dead just yet.

Good idea/ bad idea

But excited as we are at the prospect of deliveries from the sky, some careful thought makes us think that it might not be the smartest thing in the world to have hundreds, or even thousands, of automated aircraft flying about the place dropping packages off for avid online shoppers. Both the CAA and FAA are worried about what happens should even just one drone malfunction and crash to the ground, causing damage to property, people, or both. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what could go wrong.

For example, there’s the problem of human nature: how many drones would make it back to their distribution centres, and how many would end up as trophies in the rooms of people who think “Hey, free drone!” and grab them as they complete their delivery?

And then there’s the question of organisations like the US’s National Security Agency (NSA), who, going on recent evidence, would likely have no compunctions whatsoever about piggybacking on the drones’ data feeds (GPS, video, audio) to cast their surveillance net ever wider. Two years ago that idea would sound completely far-fetched, but after a certain whistleblower’s enlightening disclosures, is that still the case?

So for now, Amazon’s plans to add an airborne delivery system to their already-huge distribution network are on hold. While we and many others are undoubtedly disappointed, not having projects like that going live without proper safeguards in place might be a good thing in the long run.

[Source – The Guardian UK, Image – Technobuffalo.com]