It’s Not April Yet...

From time to time I will wander across a story so outlandish that I have to start back-tracing the sources to make sure it isn’t another Internet hoax or April Fool’s Day joke – to the extent that there’s any difference between them these days. Years ago this wasn’t such a big deal, in the sense that if someone started telling you about something that sounded like a plot device from a James Bond movie you could just assume they were kidding. But we’re living in an era in which we actually have television sets that watch you while you’re watching them, mass-market cars with an Autopilot function as standard equipment, and semi-autonomous flying drones that can deliver a package of cheesy-puffs directly to your doorstep without direct human control. Even in this era, though, I have to say that the Flying Warehouse concept seemed like a hoax the first time I saw it…

If you missed the story you can pick it up from the Gizmodowebsite here, but the basic idea is that Amazon (who else?) has been talking about pairing their delivery drones with a flying distribution center that would make them somewhat more efficient. The thing looks more like a high-tech blimp than an Avengers-style helicarrier, which actually makes it more believable, in the sense that very large lighter-than-air vehicles have been possible for more than a century, but 100,000-ton flying aircraft carriers still aren’t. The company hasn’t definitively stated if the production models will use helium, hot air, or some other form of lifting gas, but they are talking about using solar and other renewable energy types to move the thing and maintain altitude and position once it’s on station. The drones can then just glide down from the carrier, unpowered except for their guidance/control surfaces, and use their solar collectors to ride back up to their mothership…

Naturally, there are a number of questions about this vehicle that remain unanswered. For example, how do the crew get to and from work? Even if a fully-automated warehouse this size is possible (and there are some issues with that), not having any human crew aboard to deal with unexpected problems or at least fix the robots when they break down does not seem like a good idea. Then there’s the resupply problem – how exactly does the flying warehouse replenish its inventory? You could land it next to a railroad yard or a conventional warehouse every so often and transfer cargo aboard, but the whole point of this thing is that you don’t land it; it’s supposed to be in the air launching and recovering drones. You could have two of them working the same position, and reload one on the ground while the other is in the air, but now you’re doubling the cost of the operation, not to mention the costs of the ground base you would need to support the airships…

Now, we should probably note that so far, at least, all the company has done is to register the patent for their flying warehouse design; there has been no suggestion that Amazon has any plans, immediate or otherwise, to actually build these things. It’s entirely possible that they did so just to establish their claim to one or more of the technologies involved in the design; it’s even possible that the entire project is a decoy to keep potential competitors from looking too closely for what Amazon is really working on for their next big innovation. People tend to forget that Amazon is, by some measures, the world’s largest technology company, and that it employs a huge collection of technology experts who have no particular attachment to traditional business models or operations methods. If anybody out there would have both the ability to develop a flying warehouse and the sheer gall to do it, it’s almost certainly them…

I don’t mean to suggest that we’re any closer to being able to place an order from Amazon and have whatever we want land on our doorstep an hour or so later when the drone drops it off. But we should probably keep in mind that when the idea of e-commerce first appeared people dismissed that as preposterous science fiction rubbish, too, - and that wasn’t that long ago…