While Amazon has struggled to persuade the FAA to extend its leash, other companies’ drone delivery programs have moved forward.
United Parcel Service announced in January 2022 that it had completed 10,000 flights using the Matternet M2 drone and delivery system, the first to achieve FAA type certification.
Wing, the drone delivery subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet, was the first in the industry to obtain a Part 135 certificate, in April 2019, and now has delivery programs in Virginia, Texas and parts of from Finland, Ireland and Australia. Customers can use a Wing smartphone app to order items from the Walgreens pharmacy. Wing has completed more than 300,000 commercial deliveries worldwide.
Then there’s Amazon’s longtime rival Walmart, which, in partnership with DroneUp, Flytrex and Zipline, made more than 6,000 paid deliveries in 2022 and recently expanded to 34 stores in seven US states. DroneUp founder and CEO Tom Walker says the company has conducted more than 108,000 flights without “a single reportable incident.” (There were six accidents, but none resulted in injuries or property damage exceeding $500).
When a crucial 18601B exemption was finally granted to Amazon in November 2022, it wasn’t what Prime Air executives were hoping for. Any operation “over people,” “over roads,” and within “100 feet laterally of any person during all phases of flight” required special approval from an FAA administrator. Visual observers, as before, were required to maintain line of sight on the drones from launch to landing. Observers were also required to inform the pilot of any obstacles posing a risk to operation, such as stray dogs, amateur drones, kites and children.
Whether Amazon’s drones can actually safely fly over roads and residential areas has been a subject of debate among the company’s flight crews and security teams.
Some members of these units say there have been a series of accidents due to engine failures, overheating of electronic speed controllers and inexplicable restarts of in-flight software. One, in June 2021, resulted from an MK27 drone overheating near the launch pad and falling to the ground, causing a 25-acre brush fire in Pendleton, Oregon.
A former aerial operator who works closely with Prime Air’s drones says safety issues caused by faulty motors and other hardware issues have been largely resolved in the MK27-2, but unforeseen software bugs arise always. “The computer, the ACS, the brains of it all, is constantly telling the plane what to do and how to do it,” they say. “So when it starts up again, you don’t get any power or signals or commands to the motors. Everything happens offline. She turns into a brick and falls from the sky.
