Amazon is still struggling to make drone deliveries work
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Loading... - Amelia McPherson
- 12 Apr 2022
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A report from Bloomberg details the obstacles hampering Amazon’s efforts to get its delivery drone program off the ground, citing a high employee turnover rate and potential safety risks.
According to Bloomberg, there were five crashes over the course of a four-month period at the company’s testing site in Pendleton, Oregon. A crash in May took place after a drone lost its propeller, but Bloomberg says Amazon cleaned up the wreckage before the Federal Aviation Administration could investigate. Amazon spokesperson Av Zammit disputed this, saying that Amazon followed orders it received from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to document the event and move the drone.
The following month, a drone’s motor shut off as it switched from an upward flight path to flying straight ahead. Two safety features — one that’s supposed to land the drone in this type of situation and another that stabilizes the drone — both failed. As a result, the drone flipped upside down and dropped from 160 feet in the air, leading to a brush fire that stretched across 25 acres. It was later put out by the local fire department.
“Instead of a controlled descent to a safe landing, [the drone] dropped about 160 feet in an uncontrolled vertical fall and was consumed by fire,” the FAA said in a report of the incident obtained by Bloomberg.
Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos first announced 30-minute drone deliveries in 2013, and almost 10 years later, we still don’t have drones delivering Amazon packages to our doorsteps. In 2019, the company previewed a redesign of its Prime Air delivery drone that has the ability to fly vertically and hinted at launching drone deliveries later that year — a promise that went unfulfilled. One year later, Amazon announced FAA approval for the company to operate as a drone airline in 2020, which Amazon’s vice president of Prime Air said was “an important step forward for Prime Air.” Read More…
