I order a large quantity of items from Amazon both for personal and business usage. Although yes, there are SOME smaller items, I would say that the majority of items I purchase are medium sized boxes which rarely weigh less than 2kilos. A box of A4 paper packs is a very common order of mine, as is printer ink toners (which again are quite large) from them. The size of the drone required to lift this, and fly safely with a canopy to keep the paper dry would need to be the size of a baby pram! I seriously doubt that they're going to be developing anything that size.
Amazon's considering drones up to 25kg at present flying at 50mph - i.e. about the weight of a pram with a toddler in it. I think we're a little way from 'Ikea' drones, but other than a high-chair I think a drone like that could carry anything I've ever ordered from Amazon (not much recently - I'm boycotting them).
My r/c helicopter could carry up to 50% of its weight as payload, so even being very conservative, a 25kg drone should be able to carry your wad of printer paper without difficulty.
At 50mph working within a 10 mile radius, a drone should be able to deliver at least two packages an hour and probably rather more as most trips won't be 20 miles return.
3. Have you considered the cost of replacing those highly flammable, explosively dangerous Li-Ion batteries that can only do a certain number of charge cycles reliably?
I suppose they could always use those benign, Li-Fe batteries that can do several thousand charge cycles before needing to be recycled. A123 batteries have been capable of this for years. They're slightly less energy dense than Lithium Polymer batteries which is why aerobatic r/c aircraft use the higher performance ones, but still up to the job. Or perhaps they'll decide to use LiPo batteries and recycle them on a regular basis. Economies of scale mean you can consider things like that, which wouldn't be practical for individuals.
9. What happens if you live in the basement, or share a room in a flat? Or conditions make it difficult to reach one side more than another? GPS coordinates being accurate? How do they obtain the GPS coordinates? Google Maps has put my house over 50m of where it actually is!! A basket, will also get wet, will the basket be big enough to handle the packages, will everyone wanting to use the service have to purchase specific baskets to be able to receive their packages? I am sorry - I just don't see this happening...
They might get through a lot of plastic wrapping. If this ever takes off we would end up modifying our environments to cope with the service. Perhaps flats would have an 'Amazon Locker' as my local supermarket does. Perhaps houses would have a little box sticking out with a hatch that opens. Perhaps Amazon would subsidise them for Prime customers. Contrariwise I live in a rural area where there are people living in places only accessible by foot or on a quad bike. Not many, I grant you, but there are people who the couriers aren't going to serve who would actually be better reached by a drone service.
There are also still areas without mobile phone service or the internet. Just because a service doesn't reach everybody doesn't mean that it won't take off.
8. Just an approved mode S transponder costs more than a £1000 alone.... So that's unlikely to be the case. Even if they do design their own, I doubt the CAA will just let them use if without being fully approved by them, and that R&D will take upwards of 5 years, cost a huge amount of time etc... That cost will need to be offset at some level in their production line.
OK... Mode S wouldn't be particularly suitable anyway. In their favour, drones have very quick reaction times and are likely to be much more agile than manned aircraft. They're going to need accurate navigation (GPS); see-and-avoid for temporary obstacles such as cranes; see-and-avoid to cope with birds, r/c aircraft and kites, and probably also to cope with real aircraft. I anticipate they will carry transponders of some sort - probably fairly short range - as part of a belt-and-braces approach. Perhaps something like the PilotAware system. Many of these technologies are starting to reach maturity. The issues are more to do with legislation and standards than the technology. As for IMC... you need to be able to see and avoid static objects to within your stopping distance which even at 50mph could be just a few tens of feet.
I'll add 11. Which is how does the pollution of noise, and level of traffic at low level affect the birds living in the city? What is the environmental impact of having thousands of drones flying all over the city? What is the noise impact for people living there? What is the level of camera activity that will be allowed, how does that sit with privacy laws...etc... There are so many issues that can and in my humble opinion WILL squash any possibility of this.
I would anticipate that noise levels would be reduced. Swapping the noise of a car with a person in it driving down to the shops, for a quiet electric drone is likely to reduce noise and pollution levels considerably.
The impact on birds is an interesting one. I used to fly my helicopter round the park and the birds generally didn't seem to care. A seagull once tried to attack it, and it pulled off some serious aerobatics as it realised its mistake at the last moment. My bet would be that most birds will learn to ignore them pretty quickly but that they might make some of the smaller birds a bit nervous. A good question, but 'what will they do to the birds' has never had much of an impact on the uptake of streetlights.
As an aside, I once lived in a village with no roads - a kibbutz. There were access roads where you could take a hand-cart and a ring-road for vehicular traffic. For wildlife, it was a real haven. Lovely gardens. Woodpeckers, kingfishers all around. Glorious. A future with fewer roads - which drones could help enable - would very probably be rather good for wildlife even if certain species might get a bit anxious about them.
We've reached a watershed where quite difficult problems are becoming technically easy to solve and those who are bold enough and rich enough to throw money at the problems can progress rapidly. All the technological objections you raise could be worked around, often fairly trivially. There are no show-stoppers. The harder issues to solve are going to be sociological such as loss of jobs in the driving and courier industries.