Amazon announces drone delivery service
Will fly packages to your door from 2015.
Retail behemoth Amazon has announced plans to fly packages direct to your door via unmanned drone, starting in the US in 2015.
Amazon Prime Air's robotic vehicle will pick up your order from a production line, clip the package to its belly and fly off to your house. Really.
Urban areas will see the drones first, where package delivery time will be reduced to as little as 30 minutes from placing your order.
The technology's main holdup is the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)'s current rules for aerial vehicles. Handily, these are now being updated to account for new forms of unmanned air traffic.
"We hope the FAA's rules will be in place as early as sometime in 2015," Amazon explained. "We will be ready at that time."
The company is aiming to make the sight of Prime Air drones "as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today".
There's a video below showing off the whole process in action, although it leaves a number of questions unanswered. What if your delivery address isn't a leafy suburban home with a big garden to land in? What if the aircraft malfunctions? How do you avoid someone intercepting the drone and stealing your copy of FIFA?