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Why drone delivery is still a bust

When people who work in an industry are skeptical as to the viability of one element of that industry, you think the beancounters and corporate planners would listen don't you?

Well when it comes to something that has been proposed for as long as drone delivery I'm constantly amazed at how deaf companies like Google and Amazon are to both industry experts and regular consumers.

Way back in 2017, Jeff Bezos promised that Amazon would soon be delivering its products by drone -- and that got a lot of people excited. Perhaps the only ones who weren't excited were those who knew how much of a folly B2C drone delivery clearly was.

Since then, both Amazon and Google have engaged in numerous drone delivery trials but outside of a very few (and reducing) trial locations, your Amazon purchases, your fast-food and everything else will be delivered by traditional means, not by a small unmanned aerial vehicle.

Despite Google and Amazon having quite different strategies for their drones and delivery techniques, neither has taken off and changed the face of that expensive last-mile in the delivery chain.

Google has a division called Wing which has developed a light-weight drone that employs a lot of very small motors and a structure built largely of foam plastic. That makes it lightweight and low-risk from an aerial hazard perspective. The Wing drone lowers its payload to the ground using a line and winch so as to ensure that even delicate consignments arrive without damage.

By comparison, Amazon is using an 35Kg behemoth of a machine with fewer but bigger propellers and employs far more rigid/heavier materials for its frame. The method of dispensing the payload is also somewhat different. An Amazon drone simply hovers over the delivery location and boots the package out the back, allowing it to fall to the ground from several metres up. Needless to say this precludes the delivery of fragile items and can also pose a risk to whatever is immediately below the drone at eject-time.

Both Amazon and Google have had their failures.

A few years ago a Google drone took out power to hundreds of Australian houses when it performed a "precautionary landing" on some high-voltage powerlines and tripped circuit breakers to almost an entire suburb.

Amazon has had a small but growing number of crashes, usually involving collisions with inanimate objects such as cranes and apartment buildings. You'd think such fixed structures would be relatively easy to avoid -- but apparently not.

The thing that has really killed drone delivery as a practical option for both consumers and suppliers alike is much simpler one though: noise.

It seems that people will put up with a lot if it means they can get pizza or tube-socks delivered within minutes of being ordered but the one thing they can't stand is the constant buzzing of busy drones transiting across suburban skies.

For several years, Google boasted about its Australian trials and claimed hundreds of thousands of successful deliveries.

The thing that ultimately killed it was the growing number of noise complaints from those who lived under the flight-path of those drones.

Now, in the USA, communities in which drone delivery trials are operating are also pushing back hard against the noise these craft generate.

Recently Amazon announced that it would be launching drone delivery trials in Australia and the pushback has been immediate with a website already being launched to heighten awareness and recruit the public to get involved in saying "No".

There's also an interesting YouTube video from Brent Pearson who is leading the campaign to have these trials halted:

I can only imagine how much money Amazon and Google have spent on these drone delivery trials but all the hurdles I have long warned about have proven to be real. The truth is that drone delivery, despite the hype being rolled out by those in the business, simply isn't going to fly any time soon.

Unlike some, I'm not about to let my enthusiasm for drones corrupt my reasoning in such matters.

Carpe Diem folks!

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