Did you forget a gift? No worries, just get it flown to the party. Left your toothpaste at home on a business trip? Get it air-dropped to the hotel. Your phone case broke? You get the idea.

Digital retailer Amazon is planning to use drones to fly packages less than five pounds to its customers in about 30 minutes, making instant gratification a little closer to instant. The service, called Amazon Prime Air, was announced in 2015, and details of the project were released Jan. 19.

Amazon plans to manufacture its own brand of drones designed to avoid obstacles both in the air and on the ground. The drone, containing the package, would be dispatched, reach a maximum altitude of 400 feet (all the while scanning its surroundings to ensure safety), lower itself to a landing area designated by the customer, release the package, then return to its port warehouse. Jeremy Clarkson can tell you more about it in the video above.

But don't race to your Amazon Prime account just yet; some technicalities have to be worked through.

Paul Misener, VP of Global Public Policy at Amazon, told Yahoo! Tech that pricing, design and landing pads are all TBD. One of Amazon's greatest challenges will be the engineering of the drones.

"Well, it's not going to be some science fiction, Hitchcock scenario; that's a bit of an exaggeration," Misener said. "But if we design these correctly, they won't be loud and obnoxious and noisy. It's a really cool engineering challenge, it turns out. I mean, there are a bunch of challenges."

One of those challenges is gaining approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the organization responsible for aircraft safety. Amazon has proposed a new design that separates the airspace above us into different sections.

"We were thinking: Manned aircraft above 500 feet. Between 400 and 500 feet there’d be a no-fly zone — a safety buffer," Misener said. "Between 200 and 400 feet would be a transit zone, where drones could fly fairly quickly, horizontally. And then below 200 feet, that would be limited to certain operations. For us, it would be takeoff and landing. For others, it might be aerial photography. The realtors, for example, wouldn't need to fly above 200 feet to get a great shot of a house."

Misener added that he's "hopeful this will spur discussions about exactly how to get this right."

What many people don't realize is this isn't some kind of Orwellian concept; the technology to automate aircraft has existed for years. According to The Verge, many passenger jets already rely on software to fly and land, with humans manually controlling planes for an average of seven minutes or less during each flight.

However, so far, the FAA has insisted that drones must always be controlled by a human pilot and stay within that person's line of sight, making the possibility of a large-scale delivery fleet nearly impossible.

So is this thing real? Or is it science fiction?

"I can tell you, it is very real," Misener said. "We've beefed up a team at Amazon Prime Air that includes aeronautical engineers, roboticists, a former NASA astronaut. These folks are completely focused on making this a reality — and demonstrating that it is safe before we begin operations. Challenges are there, for sure, but once we demonstrate that this is safe, we'll be able to take it to the regulators and hopefully deploy it for our customers quickly.

"I've seen it. It's going to happen. It's coming."