Amazon Starts Delivering Medications by Drone in Texas City (bloomberg.com) 29
Amazon has started delivering prescription medications by drone in a Texas city, broadening its still-experimental effort to deliver goods by air. From a report: The online retailer recently began listing drone delivery as an option for Amazon Pharmacy customers who are participating in a test program in College Station, one of two US cities where Amazon is delivering products using its unmanned, riding-lawnmower-sized vehicles. The company made the effort public on Wednesday ahead of a logistics press event held at a warehouse near Amazon's Seattle headquarters.
Quick delivery of medical supplies has emerged as one of the leading candidates for a viable delivery-by-drone business. Alphabet's Wing, United Parcel Service and drone startup Zipline have all set out to deliver medical goods, sometimes in trial programs centered around hospital campuses or planned communities. In most places, drone use remains limited to narrowly prescribed tests as regulators hash out regulations to limit risk to other aircraft and people on the ground.
Quick delivery of medical supplies has emerged as one of the leading candidates for a viable delivery-by-drone business. Alphabet's Wing, United Parcel Service and drone startup Zipline have all set out to deliver medical goods, sometimes in trial programs centered around hospital campuses or planned communities. In most places, drone use remains limited to narrowly prescribed tests as regulators hash out regulations to limit risk to other aircraft and people on the ground.
are all controlled drugs allowed on them? (Score:2)
are all controlled drugs allowed on them?
Re: (Score:2)
are all controlled drugs allowed on them?
Unsure, but it doesn't appear they are flying over Florida yet, so...
Re: (Score:2)
Skeet shooting for fun and profit.
Re: (Score:2)
Good luck! You know those drones are going to have full-time video streaming back to HQ, so when you take out that drone, they'll have a nice video of you, and your location.
Why a city? (Score:2)
Shouldn't drone delivery first prove itself by working in rural areas? That's where delivery is expensive. Plus, everyone has enough land to put a drone/item landing pad. Also, the way Amazon is doing it is stupid. Drones are loud -- the best solution I've seen is from Zipline where they hover a few hundred feet above and tether down a delivery droid (to navigate against wind) that encloses the item. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] Why is nobody else doing that?
Re: (Score:2)
Rural delivery is where drones would excel at. Especially for staple goods, where having a drone deliver supplies would take less fuel than driving 30-50 miles to the nearest Dollar General to pick up stuff. Even if the drone flew to a landing pad, dropped a crate and flew off, it would help things.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly! But all teh drone delivery companies seem to be mainly focussed on city delivery. They are likely to annoy city people enough that they would get banned, from everyewhere. Instead they should prove it works in rural and then move to city.
Re: (Score:2)
If drone delivery makes sense for anything, it might be food.
Re: (Score:2)
But how many places are there where the US mail does not visit every day already?
If drone delivery makes sense for anything, it might be food.
It's not a matter of reliable delivery.
It is viable because pharmacies and pharmacy-by-mail outfits absolutely suck and excel at wasting time and not delivering the drugs the doctor prescribed.
If you have to do it by drone to bypass the existing pharmacies, so be it. It's got nothing to do with it being a drone. It's to do with not being and existing pharmacy.
Re: (Score:2)
Food has a low weight to cost ratio.
Re: (Score:2)
Drones don't easily deliver things 30-50 miles. Also, it would be much more expensive than just sending something in the mail, and people who live in rural areas are generally poor.
Re: (Score:2)
Them going with this spot in Texas might just be a case of this town being both an easy spot to get authorization from local government and close to where the team working on this lives. Or it might be that rural areas dont have the concentration of potential customers within the small geographical area they want to test in to be an effective test area.
At the end of the day this is just a small test of the system and while systems like these would certainly be more beneficial to rural customers as you say I
Re: (Score:2)
You’re concerned about the noise from drones in a city?
Re:Why a city? (Score:4)
Shouldn't drone delivery first prove itself by working in rural areas?
Why? Because only people in rural areas infect others by being forced to walk into a doctors office to get the same drugs that could be delivered remotely to mitigate that risk? Wouldn't that be a higher risk in metro areas?
Also, the way Amazon is doing it is stupid. Drones are loud...
The noise of a drone for a couple of minutes is a lot quieter than listening to someone cough all night keeping others awake...for them to be a bit too tired to pay attention on the road the next morning, causing that accident...
Yes, it's quite incredible how shortsighted we're being about mitigating certain risks our society has normalized. I'd say it's classified as downright ignorant in a post-COVID world. Keep the infected at home if we can still diagnose and treat them effectively. Telehealth didn't fall off the back of the regulatory truck yesterday.
Re: (Score:2)
We're looking ahead. It starts with need to have drugs and it ends up being your big mac tomorrow. Baby steps and before you know it, you'll see and hear these noisy things constantly.
I'm honestly not looking forward to it. It will also kill how many jobs?
Re: (Score:2)
We're looking ahead. It starts with need to have drugs and it ends up being your big mac tomorrow. Baby steps and before you know it, you'll see and hear these noisy things constantly.
I'm honestly not looking forward to it. It will also kill how many jobs?
Big Mac analogy isnt without irony. Gut feeling is we'll have McShitFood being flown in by drone before we get approval to fly drugs in to counteract the medical problems arising from babies learning more to waddle than step. Obesity is a helluva profit margin. Just ask Big Pharma.
Everything is killing jobs. Even societies who aren't replacing their aging workforce are inadvertently doing it. Nothing is providing a real answer to that problem, including Government. Perhaps we should be focusing our AI
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I don't know about other countries, but we are making up our population birth decline with immigration. Without immigration, we'd have even fewer workers.
Re: (Score:2)
Shouldn't drone delivery first prove itself by working in rural areas?
As someone who works in College Station, it (together with its sister city, Bryan, where I live) is basically a suburb of 220K surrounded by rural ranch land—for a 1-3 hour drive—in all directions.
Re: (Score:2)
And for those of you not familiar with Texas, a city of 220K is a village, by Texas standards. :-)
(Howdy neighbor! I live just down the road in Spring!)
Why? (Score:2)
If these are presciption drugs then there is a schedule they get delivered on. There is no need to quickly deliver them. For hospitals or doctors I can see a possiblew need for rush delivery in certain situations, but how much faster is a drone delivery compared to a road delivery? And cost?
Re: (Score:2)
What do you think the TRUE cost is of someone being forced to walk into a doctors office full of infection, only to be seen for a whopping 90 seconds by a doctor to barely confirm the highly infectious disease/virus du jour and give that highly infectious human the same thing that could be delivered by drone without running the additional risk of infecting anyone else?
Our elderly loved ones who are at the highest risk, would love to know.
Re: (Score:3)
This doesn't make any sense. You typically don't get your medicines from the doctor's office, you get them from a pharmacy. And the doctor still has to diagnose your illness and prescribe the medicines, regardless of how you eventually receive the medicine.
Re: (Score:2)
I can hear the future... (Score:2)
DEJA VU: flying cars (Score:2)
This flying delivery thing is like flying cars but it's actually worse:
Flying cars don't work because the energy used is too expensive; even with better tech. Rolling is always cheaper. You have to carry many lightweight items far and fast to make it worth the speed premium.
All eliminating labor costs does is raise the threshold where it's profitable. People with money to waste can pay premium but anybody sane will not choose to use it.
Last-mile delivery is a huge problem where if you bulk carry to reduce w