Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design
Here's what I think is more likely:<p>A small regional airport is taken over by Amazon.  They build hangars and warehouses onsite.<p>It's ramped up to land and fly a big turbine-powered mothership every five minutes.  The warehouse dispatches packages to stacks of delivery drones like the one pictured in the video.  The mothership loads the delivery drones in order.  The motherships take off regularly, and then as the mothership flies near the target swath, the drones are released one by one and glide to the target zone efficiently before doing a vertical landing.<p>Empty, they return autonomously to a small recovery facility in a vacant lot somewhere within ~5km.  They're packed into a pickup or a semi and returned to the airfield in stacks.<p>------<p>Why?<p>Because VTOL flight is not easy to do at long ranges;  Batteries generally limit that to 10-30 minutes since vehicle mass fraction is large.  Because very small planes are only a small multiple (2-5x) more efficient than VTOL flight.  Because high speeds are something vehicles like this are not great at.<p>A drone like this doesn't have a great straight-line range when you sling a heavy load under it;  Amazon is not going to erect sizable warehouses within ~5km of every plausible delivery.  Their stock is too large, and too sparsely ordered.<p>--------<p>Or, even more likely?<p>Replace the flying mothership with a box truck dispenser.  The driver stops at his target neighborhood, sends the drones out, they deliver autonomously, takes the drones back in 10 minutes later, and returns to regional warehouse in the next 20-50 minutes of driving, for 30 to 60 minute delivery.<p>Amazon gets to deliver to a neighborhood rather than to a house.