30 November 2015

Prime Air: Amazon's new Delivery Drone transforms into a plane

Amazon has a new design for its delivery drone presented that someday should pack fly directly to the customer. The new model is not a pure quadcopter more but an aircraft that can off and land vertically. In straight flight but the rear propeller is used. Even small wings owns the aircraft that transported the package in the centrally arranged hull. This drive should be much more economical. The drone will thus be able to fly around 25 km away and reach a speed of almost 90 km / h.

The old drone that showed Amazon to present its delivery idea, however, still looked like an ordinary quadcopter, which is also used for filming and photographing. The new model has also become much larger.

The fired from the BBC presenter Jeremy Clarkson, who now works for Amazon, presented the drone and says in the video that Amazon is working on a whole family of new drones for different applications and locations. The Moderator trio Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond is turning a new car show exclusively for Amazon Prime members.

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Amazon's new delivery drone (Picture: Amazon)

The presented VTOL UAV (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) seeks his own business a sufficiently large landing area for delivery, said the video also has been a help with a marker in the garden of the customer. Trees and other obstacles are to be detected automatically. This shows already that the point of use the proposed model will be more rural areas.

Amazon has announced its first drone delivery service Prime Air in December-2013. It is still unclear whether Prime Air can become a reality. Although the US Air Traffic Control FAA adopted new rules for the commercial operation of drones beginning of the year, which was previously largely prohibited. The rules, however, require that the drone pilot always keeps visual contact with the aircraft. This would delivery service is no longer feasible.

However, the FAA has a test program for drone flights without visual contact starts and for then a new set of rules in view.

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