Amazon's first drone delivery: our exclusive interview

December 7 was a big day for Amazon (AMZN). It made its very first delivery of a package by drone.

It was in England, it wasn’t far from Amazon’s warehouse, it’s daylight/good weather only, and it’s available to only two customers at the moment. But Amazon says that it will soon expand availability to dozens of UK customers, then hundreds, and then—regulations willing—the world.

Don’t expect to get 30-minute Amazon Prime Air delivery in the US any time soon, though. Amazon’s ambitions are being thwarted by the FAA, which has yet to approve Amazon’s drone-delivery plans here.

There are plenty of questions about delivering packages by automated drone. How will it work? Will the skies become black with drones? Will they collide with planes? What about apartment dwellers?

So when I reported my story about the current legal status of drones for “CBS Sunday Morning” (you can watch the story here), Amazon, of course, was one of my first stops. In October 2015, I interviewed Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president for global public policy.

In honor of Prime Air’s first successful package delivery, I thought that maybe it’d be worth re-posting the edited transcript of my interview with Amazon’s Misener.

Amazon Global Public Policy Vice President Paul Misener testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, June 17, 2015 AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

David Pogue: First of all, tell the unenlightened about Amazon Prime Air.

PM: Well, soon after I joined Amazon in early 2000, my young son was sitting on my lap. And we ordered something from Amazon, and he hopped off and ran up to the front door, waiting for the brown truck to show up on the spot. That was a high-delivery expectation. (LAUGH) I had to explain that just because we’d bought this thing doesn’t mean it’s at the front door yet.

So Prime Air is a future delivery service that will get packages to customers within 30 minutes of them ordering it online at Amazon.com.

The characteristics of these drones that we have set as goals for ourselves are: the range has to be over 10 miles. These things will weigh about 55 pounds each. But importantly, they’ll be able to deliver parcels that weigh up to five pounds. And it turns out that the vast majority of the things we sell at Amazon weigh less than five pounds.

DP: OK, a few questions pop up right away. What if I’m not home?

PM: It gets delivered to your doorstep, or wherever you want in your yard, just as like it would be if it were delivered by the UPS truck.

DP: What about if there’s some guy with a shotgun who sees that I’m getting a TV and wants to shoot it down?

PM: I suppose they could shoot at trucks, too.

We want to make the deliveries. And we believe that these Prime Air drones will be as normal as seeing a delivery truck driving down the street someday. So the novelty will wear off.