Amazon has begun testing its long-awaited drone delivery service in Arizona, The New York Times reported on Friday.
A dream of founder Jeff Bezos for almost a decade, Prime Air looks to take convenience shopping to the extreme promising the delivery of household items weighing five pounds or less in under an hour. The first successful runs of the 80 pound drones flying packages above family homes took place in Goodyear, Arizona a suburb of Phoenix.
Amazon will use the MK-30 delivery drone, able to operate in light rain and reaching speeds up to 73 mph while carry packages in a special compartment. Equipped with cameras and sensors, the drones can identify a clear spot for dropping packages without the need for customers to place QR codes in their yards, which was required in previous test runs.
"It is the first drone we have developed from the ground up using a requirements-based process including more stringent requirements that will allow us to eventually reach a half billion customers annually,” explained Stephen Wells, chief project engineer for the Prime Air team. "We designed it with aerospace levels of reliability and redundancy.”
The Jetsons-like technology is not without growing pains. The preliminary rollout can only deliver one package at a time with a single item inside. The service is also limited to daylight hours and comes with an additional fee of $9.99 for Prime members and $14.99 for nonmembers. However, Amazon plans to expand the service to allow for multiple items per package and increase the number of drones it can launch per hour.
Prime Air’s initial limitations will test the public’s acceptance of the service, no matter how fanciful the idea of an unmanned arial vehicle landing on one’s lawn with a desperately needed cellphone charger. “Any form of technology needs to have utility,” said David Carbon, Amazon’s vice president and general manager of Prime Air. “If it doesn’t have utility for the general populace, it’s a nuisance.”
Following a month of mysterious drone sightings across the Eastern Seaboard it remains to be seen whether the public will welcome a fleet of UAVs hovering above yards on a regular basis. The Prime Air launch comes the same week as the Teamsters union initiated a strike targeting seven shipping facilities across the U.S.
Earlier in December, Amazon announced it had successfully completed an initial test of its drone delivery service in Italy, as it looks to meet all the necessary safety requirement ahead of an official launch next year.
James Morley III ✉
James Morley III is a writer with more than two decades of experience in entertainment, travel, technology, and science and nature.
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