This has of course been all over the press in recent years but IMHO this new patent takes the prize for using a patent application to get great value press coverage
Does anyone believe this drone delivery (forget the airship for the time being) might work at all and, if so, how?
I think there are too many challenges to which there are no easy solutions e.g. where and how do you drop off the item? If everybody lived in a house with a garden then one could devise a system where the drone would drop off the package into a container in the garden. The package would need to be waterproof, obviously, unless the container opens to allow the drop and then closes (and such a container would need a power source). This seems technically straightforward, leaving “just” the Q of (a) theft from the container and (b) whether a drone can ever be efficient enough i.e. energy required to carry 1kg of payload for a distance which makes the radius from the distribution centre economically viable.
But in the very cases where a drone has the best chance of being efficient (large metropolitan areas – same argument with mobile phone towers) most people don’t live in houses with gardens… they are packed into apartment blocks and don’t have a space where a drone could make a drop. The only obvious spot is the roof (if it is a flat roof) and most apartment block roofs are not accessible to the residents, and would not be safe to walk around on.
There are many other delivery options available – as a matter of fact many online retailers deliver to “proximity pick-ups” e.g. small grocery stores, laundry stores, gas stations etc.
A growing percentage of deliveries are done that way as customers can then pick up at ther leisure rather than waiting all day long for the delivery van to show up.
Peter wrote:
Does anyone believe this drone delivery (forget the airship for the time being) might work at all and, if so, how?
I do. This is partially philosophical but when I imagine living in a time before flying was possible and asking the same question on.. well probably not an online forum, but you get my point.. there’d be lots of people, lots of very smart people with very good reasons why it’s never going to work. And then there’s the people who worked relentlessly to make it work and eventually did it.
Peter wrote:
I think there are too many challenges to which there are no easy solutions e.g. where and how do you drop off the item?
I can think of a couple of ways to solve this. The way I’d see this happening is that anyone, say, with an Amazon account registers a defined drop-off point. For people living in a house with a garden, they are certainly going to define a drop-off point right there – or on their balcony, or wherever. Some appartment houses in urban areas might indeed have such a drop-off point on the roof in the future rather than a mailbox on the ground. And then, for those people where this doesn’t work, you might define public use drop-off points – say one per street. A bit like glass/paper trash containers these days, or the existing (!) pick-up points for boxes that e.g. DHL provide (“Packstationen”).
I could also see this being connected to your smartphone or whatever device will become fashionable in the future – where you define your preferred drop-off point (i.e. your position!) and the time window (say, I’ll receive it at this and that place between 12:00 and 12:30) and the Amazon logistics system would work out if it can deliver at that time and position and they could instantly confirm this “appointment”.
Patrick wrote:
And then, for those people where this doesn’t work, you might define public use drop-off points – say one per street.
And why on earth might anyone deliver packages to such a pickup point by drone instead of van? Delivery by drone only makes sense (if at all) to places inaccessible by road. A multicopter drone must be the most inefficient (energy wise) means of transport ever invented. 95 percent of the power is used to generate lift (aircraft: around 10%, van: 0%), only 5% is used for horizontal motion. Range and load are determined by battery size and mass and are extremely limited. My quadcopter for example can carry 1/2kg for about ten minutes and probably less than one kilometer. Adding more batteries will simply reduce the payload.
Patrick wrote:
This is partially philosophical but when I imagine living in a time before flying was possible and asking the same question on..
Only because something once worked out in spite of the skepticism of many people does not mean that something else will do as well!
IMHO Peter is right in analysing " patent application to get great value press coverage " …
what_next wrote:
And why on earth might anyone deliver packages to such a pickup point by drone instead of van? Delivery by drone only makes sense (if at all) to places inaccessible by road.
Drop-off points in congested cities are “inaccessible by road” if you want to deliver goods to the consumer at ever-decreasing delivery times and I believe Amazon et al. have demonstrated their determination to do just that. If I order shoes on Zalando tonight, even after midnight, more often than not, they will be at my home tomorrow before noon. That’s impressive, but I think it would be naive to assume this is the end of the race.
what_next wrote:
Only because something once worked out in spite of the skepticism of many people does not mean that something else will do as well!
Of course not.
Drop-off points in congested cities are “inaccessible by road”
You can drive all over London easily at 3am, so this comes down to how much the driver needs to be paid, and whether the package can be left somewhere. I find, in business, that the limiting factor is whether leaving the package (one that is too big to go into a mailbox) “somewhere” is regarded as acceptable. The drone will have the same problem, because in most cases anywhere a drone can land, somebody can probably get in also and steal the package.
Peter wrote:
You can drive all over London easily at 3am
If I order at 5pm and want my package at 6pm, that’s nice to know but useless.
And at 5pm, I spent 2 1/2 hours driving from Tower Bridge to Heathrow during the week before Christmas to return a rental car. Won’t do it again. I almost missed my BA lounge supper, which would have really ruined my day. 
As I have stated before, the Achilles’ heel is (legally binding) proof of delivery.
The supper in the BA lounge can ruin anyone’s day. Especially when they make it in time…
Joking aside – there are several applications mentioned here where a drone delivery would be faster and/or cheaper than van delivery. I would compare this with the sea freight compared to air freight, which compete with each other, but largely serve different needs altogether. Drone deliveries will be great for lightweight, “urgent” and/or timed deliveries to low-volume or uneconomical to reach by road places.
There are many issues still to be resolved (for example, I would expect the rotors to be fully caged before any of these things go near non-operators, or at the very least soon after somebody gets injured, and the models actually used will offer fail-safety if they lose a motor, controller, or any other safety critical equipment, oherwise forget permission to operate overhead anything but open fields. But all of these issues are solvable.
And while I remain skeptical about when we see genuinely driverless cars (probably before widespread adoption of driverless trains, as long as unions fight over who is allowed to operate train doors), at some point it will happen.
What I really worry about is what will happen to all those people employed driving taxis, ubers or other minicabs and delivery vans… all jobs accessible without much education, and employing millions which will struggle to find other employment.
