Written by Jason Lowder
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…Amazon?
A whole new method of shipping was recently announced by Amazon: Amazon Prime Air, which features, instead of large FedEx and UPS trucks, small drones that deliver your package for you, and in much less time too.
As a shipping company, Schumacher Cargo is always looking towards the horizon of new and quality shipping platforms.
We’ve shipped by rail, by air, and by sea, using trains, planes, and boats, but drones? That is a new platform indeed. Let’s take a look at just what Amazon is up to with this new Amazon Prime Air program and what it might mean for the future of shipping.
30 Minutes or Less:
What if your Amazon deliveries had the speed of your pizza delivery? Well, that’s just what the folks at Amazon asked. And they came up with a solution: small drones making the deliveries instead of a teenager in a beat up Honda Civic.
The goal, as Amazon claims, was to be able to provide customers with seriously expedient access to their purchases. As Amazon carries pretty much everything under the sun, including groceries, a customer could buy the ingredients for dinner without having to run to the grocery store, delivered fresh to their house in 30 minutes.
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Not so fast, unfortunately, Amazon Prime Air is not immediately available to everyone based on a lack of FAA regulations concerning unmanned aircrafts in commercial use. It will take some time before those are put in place and Prime Air is open for business in the rest of the country. Currently only a few places out West have been allowed to experiment with the program.
There are also weight issues to consider. The drones are only capable of hauling up to five pounds for a ten-mile radius. That means that if you’re looking to ship your car you’ll still have to go the traditional route and what better place to go than Schumacher Cargo.
We might not have drones but we’ve got the staff and experience to ship most items anywhere they need to go and get them there safely.
So while this technology certainly signals that we’ve started looking at the future of shipping, for most of us, and for most of our needs, drone reliance is still a long ways off.
