A few days ago, Amazon announced that it would be starting a delivery drone service that would ostensibly revolutionize the delivery of packages ordered online. With the shopping frenzy beginning last week with Black Friday and continuing with Cyber Monday and other sale events up until Christmas Eve, FedEx, UPS, and the United States Postal Service will be hard pressed to get all the ordered packages to their recipients on time. Amazon Prime Air may be a solution to the shipping bottleneck, because they should only take about a half hour.

However, this process is going to come with a whole host of problems. The fact of the matter is that these are basically unsecured, unmanned package delivery systems that are unproven and essentially without precedent. The FAA have yet to approve it, and there are multiple safety issues to consider. For instance, the drone is an octocopter, which means that if one rotor fails, the remaining seven can maintain flight. However, what if more than one fails? What if they all fail? Will that mean that at any time a ten-pound flying contraption carrying textbooks could fall from the sky? Already, Twitter is full of comments on how people who are good shots now get free stuff, and essentially the idea has become a of joke.

In our opinion, the concept needs a lot of reworking before it is implemented, and it may not be an entirely safe or practical delivery method. It remains to be seen.

What Sparks Our Fire: Thinking outside the box is what is needed to solve shipping issues. Just maybe not this way.

Would you want to have your packages air dropped?