Drone industry split over Amazon plans for aerial deliveries Amazon's announcement on Sunday that it planned to begin delivering packages by unmanned aerial vehicle prompted wildly opposing responses, from those cheering its innovative spirit to those deriding the idea as a far-fetched publicity stunt. Nowhere was that polarisation more apparent than within the drone industry itself, as advocates and vendors of commercial unmanned aerial vehicles prepare for another bout of lobbying regulators early next year. Jeff Bezos, Amazon's chief executive, reckons that UAVs could be dropping lightweight packages on US doorsteps within four or five years. The e-commerce pioneer demonstrated a prototype "octocopter" on the 60 Minutes TV programme on Sunday, the eve of the busiest day of the US online shopping year. To Dustin Boyer, a San Francisco entrepreneur, the idea sounded familiar. Last year he pitched the idea of a "tacocopter" which would deliver fast food by drone. Though dismissed as a hoax by some, Mr Boyer insists that the idea is merely in "hover mode" as he waits for the regulatory environment to become clearer. Today, both tacocopter and Amazon's "Prime Air" plans are illegal in the US, along with all commercial drone use. "What a lot of people don't realise is it's incredibly viable from a business model perspective," Mr Boyer says. Amazon is going to make a tonne of money . . . Drones themselves are not that expensive and they are only getting cheaper. You can deliver [packages] much faster at a lower marginal cost. Amazon had to announce a drone initiative long before its launch, Mr Boyer adds, because if it did not, a rival such as Google - which is already testing self-driving cars, a harder technical challenge than airborne autopiloting - would beat them to it. Rumours in Silicon Valley suggest Google is already working on its own UAV technology, though it is not clear for what purpose, while one Australian start-up is reportedly planning drone deliveries on college campuses early next year. However, Jonathan Downey is more cautious about Amazon's idea. As chief executive of Airware, which is developing autopilot "brains" for drones, he believes that using UAVs for delivery is something better suited to remote parts of Africa than dense, built-up environments such as US cities. "We definitely think things are going to be delivered by drones," says Mr Downey. Whether it's books and whether it's by Amazon I'm sceptical, certainly within the next three or four years. Airware is working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to deliver medicines and vaccines by drone in remote regions, with a pilot of a small network of vehicles planned for next year. "These are life-or-death scenarios," he says, and viable within a couple of years because there are few people in harm's way. "In terms of the technology, a lot of what we're developing to deliver vaccines in Africa will end up being a significant portion of the technology that companies like Amazon use to deliver [in cities], even if that is in a more distant future than people would like to admit," he says, questioning whether people really need doorstep deliveries within 30 minutes of placing an order. Even supporters of Mr Bezos" scheme in principle admit that it will be difficult to put into practice. "It's a powerful concept, but is at the intersection of the two hardest challenges in the drone world today: reliable sense-and-avoid technology and regulatory approval for autonomous flights over people or built-up areas," said Chris Anderson, chief executive of 3D Robotics, which raised $30m in September to expand its drone manufacturing from personal to commercial applications. Like others in the US drone industry, Mr Anderson is hopeful that Amazon's involvement will help to put pressure on American aerospace regulators. While the Federal Aviation Authority has allowed some commercial drone flights to take place, it will not issue final guidelines for the technology until the latter half of 2015 - a date that has already been delayed. "We're really excited because we get a big player to basically sponsor the validity of having a drone business," says Christian Sanz, chief executive of Skycatch, another UAV start-up. It makes it easier for us to fight the war with FAA. However, not everyone in the drone industry is on the same side of that war. Mr Sanz is pushing for "air highways" that will allow drones to fly within controlled paths above cities, dropping off packages to designated zones, such as the lockers already used for collection by e-commerce companies such as Amazon and eBay. Mr Anderson says these "drone zones" are a "very smart" idea. But Mr Boyer believes that the concept is flawed, because battery life and capacity restrictions mean the octocopters demonstrated by Mr Bezos are better suited to short-range flight with lighter packages than truck-sized loads. "It's actually the thing that makes the least sense for drones to do," Mr Boyer says of the air highways plan, which Skycatch hopes to test over a 10-block zone of San Francisco. Right now there is a loose collection of drone manufacturers and small special-interest groups that the FAA doesn't really care about. Amazon being involved really changes the game.