The whole “deal” with Amazon is that they want to have everything you order delivered to your door as fast as humanly possible. This is why they’re trying to build a network of delivery drones and opening a warehouse in every city on Earth. But even that isn’t ambitious enough for the kings of e-commerce, now they want to put warehouses in the air. For real, these guys are nuts. In a fun way.
To be fair, the patent, newly found by BBC News after being filed in April, isn’t going to be applied to every warehouse. The idea behind the “airborne fulfillment centers,” or giant cargo blimps, is that they’ll be sent to remote events that might see a lot of Amazon orders, like Coachella or a cross-country race, and would deliver small items like food. The blimp would float thousands of feet in the air and little drones would do the deliveries.
There are, of course, a few glaring technical issues, like the fact that suspending thousands of pounds of weight from several miles up in the air over a large group of people has the potential to end very poorly. Leaving aside the danger of squishing hundreds of people, this also seems incredibly expensive and unlikely to be cost effective. BUT 1) you have to love that Amazon is this bold and 2) it would set the stage for a daring midair blimp heist, so really we need to get this into production immediately.
(via BBC)