Imagine a World where Amazon makes this a reality, excited or scared?

[Bofferbrauer2]

DonFerrari said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

1. The main problem in an Airship is that the Helium Ballons inside the rigid structure and the external hull need to be checked for holes. While you can make some small checks of the inner balloons depending on how they are arranged and if they are accessible from all sides, but for thourough checks the airship needs to be in a hangar. (That hangar is another problem btw, as it would need to be much larger than those we have for planes as an Airship is much larger in height).

2. The Mothership ain't the problem here, unless there's a leak. It's more that, to make it worthwhile, they would need to load up  several tons of goods to make it worthwhile, and loading so much packaged for end-users and pre-prepared to be shipped by drones takes a lot of time, time that a truck delivery could use much more efficiently.

3. True, but it takes time. And not everybody is in favor of so many drones, so it could take a long time to convince the lawmakers to support such a bill.

4. The mothership, yes. The drones, not so much. So they would need to wait for better weather conditions. Plus, the Airship probably needs to fly lower to release the drones in the first place.

3 - I understood this thread is about it happening in the future, not in the next couple years.

4 - The rains aren't permanent and you can drop the drones when it is appropriate so I don't see the weather being a problem. Also I guess it is manageable to have the drones to fly up and down from the airship. If the drones can't go down they wouldn't be able to get back.

Yeah, but the things need to fly to give the lawmakers any reason to change the law in the first place. It doesn't matter how long it takes until it's ready, changes will only get initiated when it's ready.

4. Of course. But like I said, unless the distances are too long, it will simply be faster and cheaper to just have truck driver deliver them one by one in bad weather conditions. And  for the last sentence: that's the reason why the Airship would need to go lower first before starting sending out the drones. And even if they could go down, such drones often have pretty low flight ceilings, so they couldn't get back to the Airship if it wouldn't lower it's altitude.