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Originally Posted by Lynx-lynx
When I think of a drone I think of a pilotless aircraft being directed by someone on the ground .... so what is meant by Amazon having/using drones?
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That's it.
Supposedly they would deliver packages that way.
While I guess it could eventually be perfected, there are difficult safety issues. It is hard for me to see it working in a built-up area with lots of trees and utility wires. See this excellent investigatory article from Jeff Bezos's newspaper:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/inv...-from-the-sky/
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Public opposition has centered on civil-liberties concerns, such as the morality and legality of using drones to spy on people in their back yards. There has been scant scrutiny of the safety record of remotely controlled aircraft. A report released June 5 by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that there were “serious unanswered questions” about how to safely integrate civilian drones into the national airspace, calling it a “critical, crosscutting challenge.”
Nobody has more experience with drones than the U.S. military, which has logged more than 4 million flight hours. But the Defense Department tightly guards the particulars of its drone operations, including how, when and where most accidents occur.
The Post filed more than two dozen Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps. Responding intermittently over the course of a year, the military released investigative files and other records that collectively identified 418 major drone crashes around the world between September 2001 and the end of last year.
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I think that having drones repeatedly come down to ground level, to drop off a package near a doorstep, and then go up high, and then come down again, over and over, would be an even bigger safety challenge than military operations.