I'm a Kansas City guy. I grew up in the area and never left. College? University of Missouri - Kansas City. Dental school? UMKC as well. I'm a midwest guy and I probably will be for the rest of my life.
Now KC doesn't have a lot of exciting things. We're just big enough to have an NFL team and my beloved KC Royals. We're also not big enough to have a lot of big city problems, which is one of the things I love. Yet, we *are* just big enough to have some cool things come to the area. About a decade ago, I was one of the first people in the US to have Google Fiber. KC was an early market for Google and I quickly had fiber both in my home as well as my office.
Now comes word of another cool tech coming to the area. In case you haven't heard, Amazon has been working on drone delivery for a few years now. The idea is for customers to order and within a short amount of time a delivery drone flies into your yard and delivers the goods. I'm not going to get into all the potential problems that come with drone delivery. Anytime a new tech comes along, there are always naysayers and there are usually problems. That goes with the category of improvement.
No, I'm not about the problems, I'm about the cool tech factor in this. I've been flying drones for years. Heck, I actually was buzzing my DJI around earlier today. My drone history goes back to the first one I flew. I had to buy a kit and I built a hexa-copter that looked more like an Erector Set than a flying machine. Needless to say I'm fascinated by how far drones have evolved. Welcome to Amazon Prime Air.
Amazon's delivery drones are currently capable of carrying five pounds or less and they have a fifteen mile radius. That means for this initial program, if you live within 7.5 miles from the facility, your light weight package may be coming right to your front yard. Even with that small area, Amazon can cover over 177K people and is planning on expanding that in the first half of 2026. KC isn't the first area to see these drones. From what I understand, there are 6 other cities in the US that are currently having deliveries via Amazon Prime Air.
Currently the drones are only flying in daylight hours with that five pound limit. However, those offerings will both expand with time. I'm going to do some digging and see if I can find out more about the navigation system they are using and how truly autonomous these things are. Militaries around the world are flying drones, large ones, routinely with little news of incidents. They have also completely changed the scope of the war in Ukraine. We're seeing tremendous advancements in the area of devices that can fly with minimal human intervention. I'm interested to see what the future holds.
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