Drone delivery is one of those things that has always sounded really cool, but has yet to see a lot of adoption. As of May of this year, Amazon Prime Air has only made about 100 drone deliveries in California and Texas (the two states where it operates). This is compared to their initial target of 10,000 deliveries before the end of 2023.

That said, last week, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approved UPS (as well as other companies) to fly drones "beyond visual line of sight." This seems like a pretty important approval, because I don't know how you deliver anything meaningful if somebody needs to keep the drone within their line of sight.

The thing that I can't get over in my mind, though, is how you deal with the noise population associated with lots of drones flying around. It's one thing if you live in a low-density community and a lonely drone comes by once in a blue moon to say hello. But in the city, even just replacing every cubed-shaped Uber Eats backpack would equal a hell of a lot of drones.

Presumably they would fly, at least some of the time, on top of our existing streets, just above the cars. Because the authorization is only for altitudes below 400 feet. So for tall buildings, you wouldn't always be able to do deliveries from the roof. And I guess that would be fine so long as they stop sounding like giant insects.

If that were to be the case, it's interesting to think about what that would do to all the real estate that exists at that same elevation.

One of the biggest news pieces of the last few weeks—at least in retail and tech circles—has been Amazon’s unmanned aerial delivery drones (also known as Amazon Air Prime). In case you missed it, here’s a video from Amazon showing them in action. 

The goal:

"To get packages into customers’ hands in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles."

Now, this won’t happen for another few years, if even that soon, but I think it’s pretty clear that this is something epic in the making. If successful, it’s going to completely rewrite, not only the retail landscape, but probably the landscape of our cities.

If you think about it, cars enabled a certain kind of retail. They enabled big box stores and those, in turn, changed our cities (for the worse, I would argue). Now what happens when the undifferentiated products of a big box store can be flown to my door step in less than 30 minutes? Suddenly getting into my car seems archaic.

There’s a great article covering Amazon’s drones and the history of American retailing in Atlantic Cities. They do a better job conveying the potential magnitude of Amazon Air Prime and so I suggest you have a read if this topic interests you.