Ever since Jeff Bezos started the website Amazon to sell books, he has wrestled with how to deliver its products as quickly and cheaply as possible. Today, Amazon, now a retail giant, remains obsessed with this issue, building its own fleet of drones, buying trailers for trucks and signing up drivers for on-demand deliveries.Amazon spent $9.4 million on lobbying in 2015, because the wheels of government don't grease themselves.
And nowhere is the company’s push to become a logistics and delivery powerhouse more evident than here in the nation’s capital. Amazon has emerged as one of the tech industry’s most outspoken players in Washington, spending millions on this effort and meeting regularly with lawmakers and regulators.
Amazon has pushed officials to allow new uses for commercial drones, to extend the maximum length of trucks, to improve roads and bridges and to prop up a delivery partner, the United States Postal Service.
Drones with packages buzzing around the skies out of the sight of the operators. Bigger trucks beating the shit out of the roads.
One scenario: A medevac helicopter lands in a parking lot or a field. That's normally done outside of any contact with air traffic control. Drones don't have anywhere near the field of view that manned aircraft do, other than maybe the Spirit of St.Louis. That a recipe for disaster.
But it'll come, regardless, because Amazon has the money to buy votes and a newspaper (the WaPo) to push it along.
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