A friend has a drone he built for aerial mapping which has a 20 minute run time so 30 minutes doesn’t seem much of a stretch. It requires a pretty chunky battery but they’re not that heavy.
This whole Prime Air thing certainly looks like vapourware to hawk Prime subscriptions to me. There are lots of kickers involved here but for me the biggest is that Amazon would have to build lots of mini distribution centres around urban centres in order to be within 5 miles of customers) which goes completely against their business model. And what would those centres stock? Surely the point of this kind of delivery service is that it’s stuff that you can’t get readily nearby at short notice which implies that it’s not day to day stuff that will be requested. Stocking unusual goods in sufficient quantities at multiple locations is not good from an inventory cost point of view.
