Amazon promises a future filled with ‘octocopter’ drone deliveries

Hate waiting for couriers and having to make sure you’re at home or in the office at a specified time? Well in the near future, Amazon could be delivering your shiny new Kindle or that awesome new office toy to you using a drone.

During an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos showed off branded “octocopters” that he claims are capable of delivering small packages up to 16 kilometres in under 30 minutes.

“These are effectively drones,” he said in the interview, “but there’s no reason these can’t be used as delivery vehicles.”

While it will take a while for the service (called ‘Prime Air’) to be approved — the FAA currently has no guidelines about using drones for deliveries — Bezos is confident it will happen in the not too distant future.

“It will work, and it will happen,” Bezos said.

The company has already set up its own landing page around the service, in which it says that it hopes to have Prime Air operational by 2014.

Of course, drone deliveries have been taking place on a much smaller scale, in sealed off areas for a little while now.

In South Africa, a drone was used to drop off beers at the Oppikoppi music festival. Earlier this year meanwhile, pizza company Domino’s released footage of it testing out a pizza delivery drone.