Between launching a charity-friendly buying program, announcing Sunday deliveries, and gearing up for the first wave of frenzied holiday shoppers, Amazon has been busy these past few weeks. But that didn’t stop CEO Jeff Bezos from spending a decent chunk of time talking to Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes about something, well, new. 
 
 60 Minutes has been more than happy to tease the unveiling with a clip of Bezos leading Rose into a room to show him something that elicited an “Oh my God!” from the veteran TV journo. The exclamation seemed to stem from a place of pleasure rather than worry, but the segment just aired and the truth is out. 
 
 So what did Bezos have up his proverbial sleeves? Amazon Prime Air drones that could feasibly be used as autonomous delivery vehicles. To hear the chief executive tell it, those electric drones — or “octocopters” as he referred to them — could make for delivery times as low as 30 minutes. Naturally, the size of those drones means there’s a strict upper limit to how much cargo they can carry, but Bezos says they can carry packages of up to five pounds for round trips as long as 10 miles. Thankfully for Amazon, that means nearly 86 percent of the items that it carries can be lashed onto one of its sky-bound couriers. 
 
 Just don’t expect to see one of them land on your doorstep any time soon. The FAA still hasn’t given its blessing to domestic drones yet (though it just recently laid out its vision for such a situation), which means the earliest that Amazon will be legally able to bring Prime Air online is in 2015 — a launch window that Bezos says is “optimistic” at best. There’s also no word on what company (if any) Amazon is working with to develop its fleet of drones, but at this stage, there’s no shortage of players eagerly working to bring drones into the world of business. 
 
 The rest of the report didn’t shine too much additional light on what makes Amazon tick, though it did afford us mere mortals a closer look at how its gargantuan fulfillment centers work. They’re stunningly large models of efficiency — the one 60 Minutes toured was 1.2 million sq. ft. and the workers packing products into parcels were able to do so with remarkable speed. 
 
 Sadly, since the segment was filmed over the span of a month, there’s no official response on the recent BBC report that took aim at Amazon UK for warehouse working conditions that could potentially cause “mental illness and physical illness”. 
 
 More on Amazon Air Prime: 
 
 Rentals Delivered By Drone Could Make Ownership Obsolete 
 
 I, Drone 

 Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had a big surprise for correspondent Charlie Rose this week. After their 60 Minutes interview, Bezos walked Rose into a mystery room at the Amazon offices and revealed a secret R&D project: "Octocopter" drones that will fly packages directly to your doorstep in 30 minutes. 
 
 It's an audacious plan that Bezos says requires more safety testing and FAA approvals, but he estimates that delivery-by-drone, called Amazon "Prime Air," will be available to customers in as soon as 4-5 years. 
 
 When Charlie Rose walked in and saw the Prime Air drones sitting on a tabletop for the show-and-tell, he exclaimed "Oh, my God!" It was a genuine reaction-- Rose and the 60 Minutes team weren't in on the secret beforehand. The story had been in the works for months before the Amazon representatives started hinting that a new project might be revealed to 60 Minutes. 
 
 "I only knew that there was a surprise coming. I had no idea what it was," says 60 Minutes producer Draggan Mihailovich. "They kept saying over and over again, 'Whatever you think it is, it isn't.'" Mihailovich grew skeptical when the Amazon PR team began to hype their surprise behind the scenes. "How great can this be?" he thought. 
 
 60 Minutes associate producer Nathalie Sommer says even Bezos built up the surprise during breaks in filming the 60 Minutes segment. During a tape change, Bezos told the producers, "If you can guess what it is, then...I will give you half my fortune and send you to Vegas with it." 
 
 When Rose, Mihailovich, and Sommer finally saw the drones, they were perplexed. 
 
 "I had no idea what its purpose was at first glance," Rose told 60 Minutes Overtime. Mihailovich thought they resembled giant, flying tarantulas: "They actually look like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel." 
 
 Then Bezos played a Prime Air demo video for the 60 Minutes team that showed how his octocopters will pick up packages in small yellow buckets at Amazon's fulfillment centers and whiz through the air to deliver items to individual customers 30 minutes after they hit the "buy" button online at Amazon.com. 
 
 COMMENT: 
 
 What do you think of Amazon Prime Air? Can Bezos bring his vision of octocopter package delivery to life-- and can he do it safely?
– No joke: Amazon has been working on delivery drones and CEO Jeff Bezos believes they could be zipping goods through the air to customers less than five years from now as part of its "Prime Air" service. The "Octocopter" unmanned aerial vehicles in development are capable of flying packages from Amazon warehouses to customers' doorsteps in as little as 30 minutes from the time the customer hits the "Buy" button, Bezos told CBS' 60 Minutes. Before the big surprise, Bezos told producers, "If you can guess what it is, then ... I will give you half my fortune and send you to Vegas with it." He says the drones can carry packages up to five pounds, which accounts for around 86% of the items Amazon sells, notes TechCrunch. In its FAQ, Amazon predicts that one day seeing Prime Air vehicles in the sky "will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today"—and it will be ready to go whenever the FAA introduces regulations for private drones, which could be as soon as 2015.