Amazon gets FAA approval to deliver to customers via drone
Post- Gazette wire services
NEW YORK — The Federal Aviation Administration said Monday it had granted Amazon approval to deliver packages by drones.
Amazon called the approval an “important step” but added that it is still testing and flying the drones. It did not say when it expected drones to make deliveries to shoppers.
The FAA’s designation of Amazon Prime Air as an “air carrier” allows Amazon to begin its first commercial deliveries in the U. S. under a trial program, using the high- tech devices it unveiled for that purpose last year.
Amazon and its competitors must still clear some imposing regulatory and technical hurdles before small packages holding cat food or toothpaste can routinely be dropped at people’s homes. But the action shows that they’ve convinced the government they’re ready to operate in the highly regulated aviation sector.
The whys arrive in herds now, proliferating like movie goblins, some morphing into real monsters, but this is no movie. At times like these, it feels as though no defense even exists.
On Friday, I was thumbing through the sports channels, stopping briefly at some studio show where the baseball avatars were talking animatedly about Jackie Robinson. Why?
One channel up, there was a live ballgame in which every player wore 42, like on Jackie Robinson Day.
Why, is this — what, Aug. 28? — Jackie Robinson Day? It’s typically April 15, and I know there was no baseball that day in 2020, but why is it today? Is it his birthday?
Within hours, that why had morphed into its monster.
Why did Chadwick Boseman die on Jackie Robinson Day? Why are so many plausible definitions of genuine irony required to arrive like a blade to the heart?
I reached Thomas Tull some 48 hours later. Mr. Tull, who with director Brian Helgeland, chose Chadwick Boseman to play Jackie Robinson in “42,” his first leading role in a soaring, luminescent career no one can believe is over. Mr.
Tull was shepherding his own whys through that singular disorienting sting of losing a close friend, this one to colon cancer. Mr. Boseman was a year older than 42.
For all the wondrous things that have happened to Mr. Tull — part Steelers owner, part entrepreneur, part philanthropist, part one- time Hollywood blockbuster producer — he’s had his share of ultra- dark moments. He took Heath Ledger’s parents to the Academy Awards, their son’s death and his Oscarwinning performance as the Joker in “The Dark Knight” churning their pain in every direction.
“That was ... that was ... unbelievably difficult,” he said, “and this year, 2020, I was also close friends with Kobe Bryant, so it’s the second time this year I’ve had to sit down with my children and explain to them that somebody that they knew, that was important to them ... those are, you know, not easy moments. That is why, to me, I try to remember every day, none of us knows what’s going to happen tomorrow or the next day, so if somebody is important to you, tell them. If you care about them, tell them.
“I’m fortunate that the last time I ever saw Chad in person, it was before COVID, it was at my house, and I told him that I was proud of him and that I loved him. He had brought his fiancee over. I try to remember that all the time, that none of us are promised anything.”
There were certainly no promises on those days eight years ago when Mr. Boseman showed up to audition to play Jackie Robinson, a noble and complicated, gifted and potentially combustible Black athlete thrust onto the stage of America’s pastime, which had never presented a player whose skin was not the approximate color of the ball.
“We had a lot of fantastic actors that came in and read for the role and did a screen test, and we kept coming back to this young unknown actor named Chadwick Boseman,” Mr. Tull remembered. “On the screen test, there was this really hard- to- pull- off vulnerability and at the same time a fierceness about him, and frankly, while you certainly want to do a great job making a Batman movie because there are many fans out there, making a movie about Jackie Robinson was for me a whole other level of responsibility. Casting that role had enormous weight to it, and it became very clear to him once he had the role the gravity of that, and the magnitude of what he was about to do.”
Mr. Boseman’s instantly evident genius in “42” was that he wasn’t “doing” Jackie Robinson, but putting Robinson’s soul on the screen in ways that it might never have been so accessible. Thus it was no surprise that he became indispensable to culturally ambitious vehicles like “Get On Up,” in which he played James Brown, and later Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in “Marshall.” His dead solid perfect performance as Black Panther cemented his legacy as a genre- busting actor of extraordinary range and significance.
But we didn’t lose the roles. The void is not in the roles. There will be plenty of roles. We lost him.
“One of my favorite moments with him was after we were done shooting [‘ 42’] and we were sitting and talking, and I said, ‘ Look, I’ve seen what happens when an actor plays Superman or Batman, then kids want to meet you and so forth.’ I said, ‘ Once this movie comes out, your life is never going to be the same. You’re going to carry that with you. And you are going to end up being a big movie star.’
“He looked at me and said, ‘ Really?’ And he meant it; he wasn’t being falsely humble.”
Mr. Boseman’s death is just the latest of the whys, the whys that are ripping a nearly unfathomable void in 2020. John Prine, John Lewis, Carl Reiner, Kobe, John Thompson, Pete Hamill, Jerry Stiller, Little Richard, Brian Dennehy, 180,000- plus innocent Americans as important to their loved ones as anyone on that incomplete list, our once common daily human interactions; it’s almost too much.
Why? What have we done?
Maybe Aug. 28 should be Jackie Robinson Day now.
Why? I don’t know. I can’t why anymore.