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Amazon is back with its latest vision for its Prime Air drone delivery system — and this time the company has brought its high-profile celebrity, TV show host and gearhead Jeremy Clarkson, along for the ride.
In a slick new ad and FAQ page published today, the company demonstrates what Prime Air could look like if and when regulators approve deliveries by unmanned aerial vehicles.
Narrated by former “Top Gear” host Jeremy Clarkson, the video tells the story “from a not-too-distant future” of one handy mom ordering a pair of soccer cleats for her daughter. After being plucked off a shelf by a surprisingly unhurried Amazon warehouse worker, the shoes make their way via conveyor belt onto a blue and orange Amazon drone, which then deposits said shoes right in said mom’s backyard, thanks to a beacon she has laid out on the lawn.
“And balance,” Clarkson says, “is restored to the universe.”
Even though the Federal Aviation Administration has been taking its time building the regulatory framework needed to make commercial drone use possible, Amazon has been flying ahead on its own, thanks mostly to a regulatory exception it got from the FAA earlier this year. In August, the company received federal approval to test commercial delivery operations.
Earlier, in late July, the company unveiled a regulatory proposal that would have set aside 200 feet of airspace for commercial drone air traffic. The scale of that traffic, which would include drone fleets from Amazon and other companies, is projected to be so massive that its operation would likely “dwarf” the total number of manned flights — some 85,000 — that take place in U.S. airspace every year. That same proposal called for a new mode of monitoring flights, as the current model, in which human air traffic controllers monitor all flights, would be unable to handle the volume.
Agencies/Canadajournal
