Wednesday, October 21, 2020
Sunday, October 13, 2019
Today, October 13, 2019, I uploaded three copies of my old radio show from the 1960's, The Sunday Session. It ran on WHEE Radio, an AM daytime-only radio station located in Martinsville, Virginia for about six years.
The show began, I believe, around June 1962 as "The Sunday Session of Wheetime" which I shortened to just "The Sunday Session". The program continued until June 1968 when the final broadcast aired.
The longest and probably the best of these shows ran on December 26, 1965 from 1:45 PM until 5:00 PM. I also uploaded two other copies of the program that were recorded in June 1965 and my final show that was recorded in June 1968.
I recorded the program in the WHEE studios on Franklin Street in Martinsville using one of the station's two Ampex 601 reel-to-reel recorders and Scotch brand 1/4-inch recording tape that I purchased from Wendy at The Music Bar, a local record store, in Martinsville. I purchased the "triple-length" version which is extremely thin and tends to stretch if you're not careful. That's why there may be a few spots missing out of the show when I accidentally got the tape wrapped around the pinch roller. Sorry!
The musical selections on these uploads have been "telescoped" out (removed) to avoid copyright issues with YouTube. I uploaded earlier versions to YouTube several months ago and finally took them down because of all the copyright problems. However, the rest of the recordings contain all of the musical intros and exits, commercials, and in most cases, the on-the-hour news broadcasts recorded in the program.
Radio Station WHEE was the brainchild of my father, John W. ("Johnny") Shultz, former Mayor of Martinsville. He, along with his close friend, Phillip E. Hedrick, who at the time was the chief engineer of Radio Station WSJS in Winston-Salem, NC, decided to go into partnership and open the station in 1954. WHEE would be in direct competition with the only other radio station in Martinsville, WMVA, which my father had managed since 1942. My dad would run the business operations of WHEE while Phil would take care of all the engineering details and the FCC licensing requirements.
In the 1920s when my father was young, he wanted to join the circus. He was very popular, talented and outgoing. Everyone who knew Johnny Shultz loved him.
In 1938. television was just being invented and radio was king of the airwaves. New stations were blossoming everywhere, in nearly every city and town in America. In Salisbury, North Carolina, my dad was called on to take the reins as the first manager of Radio Station WSTP when it went on the air in December of that year.
Two years later, I was born in Salisbury, NC, at Rowan Memorial Hospital. Two years after that in 1942, our family moved to my dad's birthplace of Martinsville, Virginia, where he had been hired to become the first station manager of Radio Station WMVA which had gone on the air in Martinsville less than a year earlier.
I grew up in Martinsville. One of the announcers at WMVA, Paul Zimmerman also had a band that played at many local functions. My father hired Paul to teach me how to play the piano. I wasn't very good at it, but they put me on the radio anyway. Paul's wife, Barbara Harding, ran a local talent show on WMVA and I played the only tune I had memorized, "Country Gardens", on Barbara's radio show. It was my first time being on the air. I was 8 or 9 years old at the time.
In 1954, my dad left WMVA and he and Phil started up WHEE, a new radio station in direct competition with WMVA in Martinsville. Several months later, he asked me if I would like to have my own radio show on the station. I agreed to do it and, at the tender age of 15, I created "Tops for Teens". My voice had not matured yet and it was not much of anything to remember, but it was my first radio program and the show ran for several months on Sunday afternoons.
In the fall of 1959, I left to attend Wake Forest College in Winston-Salem, NC. I did a little announcing at WFDD, the school's FM radio station. One day, another student announcer at WFDD asked me to drive him to WTOB to audition for a part-time job since I had a car and he didn't. WTOB was the local top-40 radio station in the local market and very popular with young adults. When we got to the station, I decided on a whim to ask if I could audition for the job too. Unfortunately for my friend, the station liked me better and hired me instead. I had hit the big time.
I loved working at WTOB. The station played the top hits of the day and was rated #1 in the local market. I marveled at their cutting-edge production techniques, tight delivery, and state-of-the-art production equipment.
One day while I was working my Sunday morning shift, they wheeled in two brand new Collins tape cartridge machines. These were the latest state-of-the-art machines that played tape cartridges that looked similar to commercial 8-track cartridges but were designed especially for radio use. These machines were gargantuan in size, about 3 feet high and nearly as wide. And, in the center of the face of the machine, there was a tiny rectangular slot where a cartridge could be inserted. A green button set the cartridge in motion and a red button made it stop.
Tape cartridge machines were an enormous revelation to radio. Before this, all of the commercials and promotional cuts at WTOB had been recorded on vinyl disks using a 78-rpm lathe cutting machine in a separate studio next to the control room. 78 recordings were immediately abandoned by the industry and tape cartridges became the standard method for playing commercials and promotional cuts. They were a boon to radio stations around the world and enabled them to create multi-faceted sounds for a generation of fast-paced radio production.
When I left the station, I took some of the old WTOB 78 records with me since they were no longer needed by the station and were destined for the trashcan. I'll upload them later here on YouTube when there's time to organize them properly.
After my father died, in 1962 I moved back to Martinsville and began working at the radio station. I was uncomfortable (actually horrified) with the way the station sounded and wanted to make changes. Radical changes. Small-town radio to me was backward, boring, and a waste of the airwaves. My eyes had been opened by working at WTOB. I wanted my station, WHEE, to sound creative, imaginative, and exciting.
But management said no. In retrospect, they were probably right, at least for a small-market radio station like WHEE with barely 50,000 population in the entire county. The station was making money with its current format. Changing it would have been risky at best. I settled on doing my own show. Naturally, it needed to run on Sunday afternoons, and The Sunday Session was born.
Thankfully, tape cartridge machines had matured over the previous few years. By the early 60s, the machines had become much smaller, compact, and much more affordable. Instead of Collins, Tapecaster and Spotmaster were the brands to buy. Radio stations around the world began to use these machines exclusively to play commercials and promotions easily with just the push of a button.
I built The Sunday Session from scratch. With the aid of the station's new Spotmaster tape cartridge machines, I made my own promotional cuts and show intros, and was really proud of how nicely they came out. I went through my own record library from home to find background music that brightened and enhanced the sounds of the show to make it more exciting, just like WTOB, if not even better. I came up with the sound of a gunshot as a time signature, and I used parts of the station's promotional recordings to create special sound bites to use only for the show.
The two tape cartridge machines in the WHEE control room weren't enough for me to create all the complex sounds I wanted to use with The Sunday Session, so when I set up to do the show, I unhooked in the two other machines that were in the second studio and hooked them up to the main console. Now I had four tape cartridge machines that all ran together to create all the special sounds of The Sunday Session.
For the next few years, I made it my mission to continually tweak and massage the show every week to make it sound the best possible. I took requests for tunes to play and, when a couple of listeners came by the station and offered their help in answering the phone, I agreed. Thank you, Alvin Jamison. And your friend, the girl, I forget her name now. They helped enormously by running into the main studio with requests that had come in over the phone from listeners requesting their favorite songs. The Sunday Session was a labor of love. I did my best to make the show exciting and enjoyable to my listeners.
I must mention here that I'm very proud of the three young men who credit me with helping them decide to make radio their profession. My hat's off to my close and dear friend, Barry Michaels, who blew me away when I met him in 1983 at the Winter Park Mall where he was doing a remote broadcast for WBJW in Orlando. These recordings would not be on YouTube without Barry's gentle urging. Check out Barry's website when you have a chance at https://www.thebarrymichaels.com/.
Thanks also to Reggie Campbell, who also went into the business, and, of course, to my dearly departed friend, Hank Hedgecock, who went on from WHEE to several stations around the country before finally settling in Richmond, VA on a couple of stations there. A special thanks also to Hank's brother, my dear friend, Sam Hedgecock, for having the presence of mind to take most of the pictures that appear on the Sunday Session CD's and the images that accompany these YouTube recordings.
You can listen to these shows at the following YouTube locations:
The June, 1965 show is at https://youtu.be/wsaB9AjI688.
The December 26, 1965 show is at https://youtu.be/oBcyWs_iiMY.
The final December, 1968 show is at https://youtu.be/0G3OJlOKjOA.
I sincerely hope you enjoy listening to these sounds from my radio show, The Sunday Session, from more than five decades ago.
Thank you for listening!
Rick Shultz
Santiago, Panama
October, 2019
You will find another copy of this page at the special Blogspot location, https://sunday-session.blogspot.com/
In December, 2019, John Franck, the webmaaster for Mavahi.com, the more-or-less official website of alumni from Martinsville High School, agreed to run some news about the YouTube shows. Thanks, John! Check the site out at www.mavahi.com.
The show began, I believe, around June 1962 as "The Sunday Session of Wheetime" which I shortened to just "The Sunday Session". The program continued until June 1968 when the final broadcast aired.
The longest and probably the best of these shows ran on December 26, 1965 from 1:45 PM until 5:00 PM. I also uploaded two other copies of the program that were recorded in June 1965 and my final show that was recorded in June 1968.
I recorded the program in the WHEE studios on Franklin Street in Martinsville using one of the station's two Ampex 601 reel-to-reel recorders and Scotch brand 1/4-inch recording tape that I purchased from Wendy at The Music Bar, a local record store, in Martinsville. I purchased the "triple-length" version which is extremely thin and tends to stretch if you're not careful. That's why there may be a few spots missing out of the show when I accidentally got the tape wrapped around the pinch roller. Sorry!
The musical selections on these uploads have been "telescoped" out (removed) to avoid copyright issues with YouTube. I uploaded earlier versions to YouTube several months ago and finally took them down because of all the copyright problems. However, the rest of the recordings contain all of the musical intros and exits, commercials, and in most cases, the on-the-hour news broadcasts recorded in the program.
Radio Station WHEE was the brainchild of my father, John W. ("Johnny") Shultz, former Mayor of Martinsville. He, along with his close friend, Phillip E. Hedrick, who at the time was the chief engineer of Radio Station WSJS in Winston-Salem, NC, decided to go into partnership and open the station in 1954. WHEE would be in direct competition with the only other radio station in Martinsville, WMVA, which my father had managed since 1942. My dad would run the business operations of WHEE while Phil would take care of all the engineering details and the FCC licensing requirements.
In the 1920s when my father was young, he wanted to join the circus. He was very popular, talented and outgoing. Everyone who knew Johnny Shultz loved him.
In 1938. television was just being invented and radio was king of the airwaves. New stations were blossoming everywhere, in nearly every city and town in America. In Salisbury, North Carolina, my dad was called on to take the reins as the first manager of Radio Station WSTP when it went on the air in December of that year.
Two years later, I was born in Salisbury, NC, at Rowan Memorial Hospital. Two years after that in 1942, our family moved to my dad's birthplace of Martinsville, Virginia, where he had been hired to become the first station manager of Radio Station WMVA which had gone on the air in Martinsville less than a year earlier.
I grew up in Martinsville. One of the announcers at WMVA, Paul Zimmerman also had a band that played at many local functions. My father hired Paul to teach me how to play the piano. I wasn't very good at it, but they put me on the radio anyway. Paul's wife, Barbara Harding, ran a local talent show on WMVA and I played the only tune I had memorized, "Country Gardens", on Barbara's radio show. It was my first time being on the air. I was 8 or 9 years old at the time.
In 1954, my dad left WMVA and he and Phil started up WHEE, a new radio station in direct competition with WMVA in Martinsville. Several months later, he asked me if I would like to have my own radio show on the station. I agreed to do it and, at the tender age of 15, I created "Tops for Teens". My voice had not matured yet and it was not much of anything to remember, but it was my first radio program and the show ran for several months on Sunday afternoons.
In the fall of 1959, I left to attend Wake Forest College in Winston-Salem, NC. I did a little announcing at WFDD, the school's FM radio station. One day, another student announcer at WFDD asked me to drive him to WTOB to audition for a part-time job since I had a car and he didn't. WTOB was the local top-40 radio station in the local market and very popular with young adults. When we got to the station, I decided on a whim to ask if I could audition for the job too. Unfortunately for my friend, the station liked me better and hired me instead. I had hit the big time.
I loved working at WTOB. The station played the top hits of the day and was rated #1 in the local market. I marveled at their cutting-edge production techniques, tight delivery, and state-of-the-art production equipment.
One day while I was working my Sunday morning shift, they wheeled in two brand new Collins tape cartridge machines. These were the latest state-of-the-art machines that played tape cartridges that looked similar to commercial 8-track cartridges but were designed especially for radio use. These machines were gargantuan in size, about 3 feet high and nearly as wide. And, in the center of the face of the machine, there was a tiny rectangular slot where a cartridge could be inserted. A green button set the cartridge in motion and a red button made it stop.
Tape cartridge machines were an enormous revelation to radio. Before this, all of the commercials and promotional cuts at WTOB had been recorded on vinyl disks using a 78-rpm lathe cutting machine in a separate studio next to the control room. 78 recordings were immediately abandoned by the industry and tape cartridges became the standard method for playing commercials and promotional cuts. They were a boon to radio stations around the world and enabled them to create multi-faceted sounds for a generation of fast-paced radio production.
When I left the station, I took some of the old WTOB 78 records with me since they were no longer needed by the station and were destined for the trashcan. I'll upload them later here on YouTube when there's time to organize them properly.
After my father died, in 1962 I moved back to Martinsville and began working at the radio station. I was uncomfortable (actually horrified) with the way the station sounded and wanted to make changes. Radical changes. Small-town radio to me was backward, boring, and a waste of the airwaves. My eyes had been opened by working at WTOB. I wanted my station, WHEE, to sound creative, imaginative, and exciting.
But management said no. In retrospect, they were probably right, at least for a small-market radio station like WHEE with barely 50,000 population in the entire county. The station was making money with its current format. Changing it would have been risky at best. I settled on doing my own show. Naturally, it needed to run on Sunday afternoons, and The Sunday Session was born.
Thankfully, tape cartridge machines had matured over the previous few years. By the early 60s, the machines had become much smaller, compact, and much more affordable. Instead of Collins, Tapecaster and Spotmaster were the brands to buy. Radio stations around the world began to use these machines exclusively to play commercials and promotions easily with just the push of a button.
I built The Sunday Session from scratch. With the aid of the station's new Spotmaster tape cartridge machines, I made my own promotional cuts and show intros, and was really proud of how nicely they came out. I went through my own record library from home to find background music that brightened and enhanced the sounds of the show to make it more exciting, just like WTOB, if not even better. I came up with the sound of a gunshot as a time signature, and I used parts of the station's promotional recordings to create special sound bites to use only for the show.
The two tape cartridge machines in the WHEE control room weren't enough for me to create all the complex sounds I wanted to use with The Sunday Session, so when I set up to do the show, I unhooked in the two other machines that were in the second studio and hooked them up to the main console. Now I had four tape cartridge machines that all ran together to create all the special sounds of The Sunday Session.
For the next few years, I made it my mission to continually tweak and massage the show every week to make it sound the best possible. I took requests for tunes to play and, when a couple of listeners came by the station and offered their help in answering the phone, I agreed. Thank you, Alvin Jamison. And your friend, the girl, I forget her name now. They helped enormously by running into the main studio with requests that had come in over the phone from listeners requesting their favorite songs. The Sunday Session was a labor of love. I did my best to make the show exciting and enjoyable to my listeners.
I must mention here that I'm very proud of the three young men who credit me with helping them decide to make radio their profession. My hat's off to my close and dear friend, Barry Michaels, who blew me away when I met him in 1983 at the Winter Park Mall where he was doing a remote broadcast for WBJW in Orlando. These recordings would not be on YouTube without Barry's gentle urging. Check out Barry's website when you have a chance at https://www.thebarrymichaels.com/.
Thanks also to Reggie Campbell, who also went into the business, and, of course, to my dearly departed friend, Hank Hedgecock, who went on from WHEE to several stations around the country before finally settling in Richmond, VA on a couple of stations there. A special thanks also to Hank's brother, my dear friend, Sam Hedgecock, for having the presence of mind to take most of the pictures that appear on the Sunday Session CD's and the images that accompany these YouTube recordings.
You can listen to these shows at the following YouTube locations:
The June, 1965 show is at https://youtu.be/wsaB9AjI688.
The December 26, 1965 show is at https://youtu.be/oBcyWs_iiMY.
The final December, 1968 show is at https://youtu.be/0G3OJlOKjOA.
I sincerely hope you enjoy listening to these sounds from my radio show, The Sunday Session, from more than five decades ago.
Thank you for listening!
Rick Shultz
Santiago, Panama
October, 2019
You will find another copy of this page at the special Blogspot location, https://sunday-session.blogspot.com/
In December, 2019, John Franck, the webmaaster for Mavahi.com, the more-or-less official website of alumni from Martinsville High School, agreed to run some news about the YouTube shows. Thanks, John! Check the site out at www.mavahi.com.
Friday, June 22, 2018
A special note about and for my grandkids, Elena, Devin and Drew, who I hope will be visiting this blog at sometime in the future. If you've just found me on this blog, I'm very happy! Please, your individual blog is also nearby, so ...
Elena, please go to https://elenashultz.blogspot.com/
Devin please go to https://devinshultz.blogspot.com/; and
Drew please go to https://andrewshultz.blogspot.com/.
Yeah, I know that they all pretty much say the same thing, but I wasn't comfortable writing you en masse in a single blog and wanted to make it more personal. I thought it was better to make each of you individual blogs, even if they each say almost the same thing, at least right now.
Please write me before I die!
panama.rick@ymail.com or rickinpanama@gmail.com
Much love from your grandfather!
【ツ】
Elena, please go to https://elenashultz.blogspot.com/
Devin please go to https://devinshultz.blogspot.com/; and
Drew please go to https://andrewshultz.blogspot.com/.
Yeah, I know that they all pretty much say the same thing, but I wasn't comfortable writing you en masse in a single blog and wanted to make it more personal. I thought it was better to make each of you individual blogs, even if they each say almost the same thing, at least right now.
Please write me before I die!
panama.rick@ymail.com or rickinpanama@gmail.com
Much love from your grandfather!
【ツ】
Saturday, July 1, 2017
Sony to Begin Producing Vinyl Records Again
Now, vinyl record sales are skyrocketing! According to Time Magazine, over 9.2 million records were sold in 2014. Then the number jumped to nearly 12 million in 2015, which was the highest sales total since 1988. Now, this past year, sales of vinyl records were actually higher than CD's for at least one month in Britain.
Sony has announced that they have "found" a cutting lathe for its Tokyo studios so they can produce master discs which are needed to manufacture vinyl records. In the U.S., NPR has reported that there are only about 16 operating presses still remaining in the country. Most of them are now overloaded with the new demand.
According to the BBC, Sony is now faced with a problem of being able to find engineers who are still alive who remember how the manufacturing process works to create vinyl records in the first place. Holy Cow! Who would have thought this would happen after CD's came along?
Thanks very much for taking the time to read my blog! If you enjoy reading these articles, please take a second to CLICK on a few of the ads that are on here alongside them. It will only take a second and would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks again! ;-}
Saturday, May 27, 2017
$500 Million Poppy Field Accidentally Discovered in N.C.
Talk about bad luck, this happened last week in Catawba County, North Carolina, and boy, the guy who was arrested must feel stupid as you-know-what.
Sheriff's Office deputies got a phone tip last week about an unrelated charge and knocked on the door of Mr. Cody Xiong. Xiong opened the door and thought the deputies were there about the illegal plants in his back yard, so he said, "I guess you're here for the opium?"
When authorities walked to Xiong's back yard, they discovered around 2,000 plants with an estimated value of about $500 million. The actual value will depend on how much the plants actually weigh. When processed, the opium is usually turned into morphine or heroin.
Opium plants are quite illegal to grow in the U.S. and most other countries. The field was about an acre in size and is located near Claremont, a Catawba County town located about 40 miles north of Charlotte. Claremont has a population of about 1,300 people.
Xiong, 37, is also suspected of being involved in a cockfighting operation. The deputies found quite a number of chickens around the home with unusual wounds. A total of eighty chickens were confiscated.
Xiong was charged with manufacturing a Schedule II drug and trafficking in opium. He has been released on $45,000 bail.
Sheriff's Office deputies got a phone tip last week about an unrelated charge and knocked on the door of Mr. Cody Xiong. Xiong opened the door and thought the deputies were there about the illegal plants in his back yard, so he said, "I guess you're here for the opium?"
When authorities walked to Xiong's back yard, they discovered around 2,000 plants with an estimated value of about $500 million. The actual value will depend on how much the plants actually weigh. When processed, the opium is usually turned into morphine or heroin.
Opium plants are quite illegal to grow in the U.S. and most other countries. The field was about an acre in size and is located near Claremont, a Catawba County town located about 40 miles north of Charlotte. Claremont has a population of about 1,300 people.
Xiong, 37, is also suspected of being involved in a cockfighting operation. The deputies found quite a number of chickens around the home with unusual wounds. A total of eighty chickens were confiscated.
Xiong was charged with manufacturing a Schedule II drug and trafficking in opium. He has been released on $45,000 bail.
Thursday, March 30, 2017
Activist Wants To Publish Politicians' Browsing Histories
Last Tuesday our beloved U.S. House of Representatives proposed legislation to wipe out the landmark online privacy protections that were approved by the FCC during the final days of the Obama administration. The Senate voted the same way last week. Now the resolution goes to President Trump's desk for his signature. The White House has said that it "strongly supports" the repeal.
The rules, which had actually not yet gone into effect, would require Internet service providers to get your permission before they can collect and share your personal data. You did know that your service provider has data on everything you do on the Internet, including your browsing history, application use and even your satellite location, right? And they would also have been required to notify you about whatever types of information they were paid to share about you.
Well, there's this guy in Chattanooga who's really upset at all of this and knows enough about how the Internet works that he can actually do something about it. Adam McElhaney has decided that when this law goes into effect, he's going to turn the tables on everybody who voted for it and purchase the Internet histories of every single legislator, congressman, and executive who voted for the bill, along with their family's information, and make it easily searchable on the web.
Yup, everything from their medical, personal, financial, infidelity, porn searches, etc. Whatever he can find, he's going to publish it for all of us to see and enjoy. And he's asking for donations, "to restore our right to privacy."
So far, his campaign, which was seeking $10,000, has raised something over $160,000 and the figure is rising fast. Adam's website is https://www.gofundme.com/searchinternethistory.
Sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
Thanks very much for taking the time to read my blog! If you enjoy reading these articles, please take a second to CLICK on a few of the ads that are on here. It would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks again! ;-}
Saturday, December 31, 2016
Amazon has this week filed a patent for airborne fulfillment centers (AFCs) that can be positioned over locations where orders for specific Amazon products are predicted to be in heavy demand. That's right, a warehouse in the middle of the sky, filled with assorted goodies that people, such as say, football fans in a stadium, might want when they have the desire for snacks, drinks or souvenirs.
In the filing, Amazon says the AFC may be located at about 45,000 feet and deploy drones, described as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), carrying ordered items from the AFC for delivery to user-designated delivery locations.
The filing further states that when one of these drones descends from the center, it will have the capability to "navigate horizontally toward a user specified delivery location using little to no power, other than to stabilize (it) and/or guide the direction of descent."
Smaller airships (shuttles) may be used "to replenish the AFC with inventory, UAVs, supplies, fuel, etc." and the shuttles may also transport workers to and from the AFC.
The drones, which may be temperature-controlled models designed specifically for food delivery, may be stocked at the AFCs and sent down to make a precise, safe scheduled or on-demand delivery.
An example cited in the filing was around a sporting event. If there’s a big championship game down below, Amazon AFC’s above could be loaded with snacks and souvenirs sports fans crave.
The AFCs could be flown close to a stadium to deliver audio or outdoor display advertising near the main event, as well, the filing suggested.
The patent reflects a complex network of systems to facilitate delivery by air.
Besides the airborne fulfillment centers and affiliated drones, the company has envisioned larger shuttles that could carry people, supplies and drones to the AFCs or back to the ground.
Using a larger shuttle to bring drones up to the AFC would allow Amazon to reserve their drones’ power for making deliveries only.
Of course, all these elements would be connected to inventory management systems, and other software and remote computing resources managed by people in the air or on the ground.
The filing also reveals that the shuttles and drones, as they fly deliveries around, could function in a mesh network, relaying data to each other about weather, wind speed and routing, for example, or beaming e-book content down to readers on the ground.
We reached out to Amazon to learn more about their progress on this concept, and whether or not they have an actual date for when they might launch, or even just test, their first airborne fulfillment center.
The company did not immediately reply to inquiries.
In the filing, Amazon says the AFC may be located at about 45,000 feet and deploy drones, described as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), carrying ordered items from the AFC for delivery to user-designated delivery locations.
The filing further states that when one of these drones descends from the center, it will have the capability to "navigate horizontally toward a user specified delivery location using little to no power, other than to stabilize (it) and/or guide the direction of descent."
Smaller airships (shuttles) may be used "to replenish the AFC with inventory, UAVs, supplies, fuel, etc." and the shuttles may also transport workers to and from the AFC.
The drones, which may be temperature-controlled models designed specifically for food delivery, may be stocked at the AFCs and sent down to make a precise, safe scheduled or on-demand delivery.
An example cited in the filing was around a sporting event. If there’s a big championship game down below, Amazon AFC’s above could be loaded with snacks and souvenirs sports fans crave.
The AFCs could be flown close to a stadium to deliver audio or outdoor display advertising near the main event, as well, the filing suggested.
The patent reflects a complex network of systems to facilitate delivery by air.
Besides the airborne fulfillment centers and affiliated drones, the company has envisioned larger shuttles that could carry people, supplies and drones to the AFCs or back to the ground.
Using a larger shuttle to bring drones up to the AFC would allow Amazon to reserve their drones’ power for making deliveries only.
Of course, all these elements would be connected to inventory management systems, and other software and remote computing resources managed by people in the air or on the ground.
The filing also reveals that the shuttles and drones, as they fly deliveries around, could function in a mesh network, relaying data to each other about weather, wind speed and routing, for example, or beaming e-book content down to readers on the ground.
We reached out to Amazon to learn more about their progress on this concept, and whether or not they have an actual date for when they might launch, or even just test, their first airborne fulfillment center.
The company did not immediately reply to inquiries.
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