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Will Amazon have to ground its drone program?

April 15, 2022Written by RetailWire Staff

Photo: Amazon

It was not so long ago that package delivery drones, specifically ones from Amazon.com, seemed poised to take flight as soon as the right regulatory bodies signed off. At present, however, the concept of package drop-off via drone is looking like it could be a dud. Amazon’s drone program is nowhere near taking off despite nearly a decade in development. The company has made a $2 billion investment and has a global team of 1,000 people worldwide working on the project, according to a Yahoo Finance report on a Bloomberg investigation. Speaking on Bloomberg TV, journalist Spencer Soper described problems with the Amazon drone design. In a test last summer, an Amazon drone experienced a motor failure while in flight and plummeted to the ground despite anti-crash safety features and caused a 25-acre brush fire with the explosion of its lithium battery. The crash of the drone, which weighs about 85 pounds, gave Federal regulators pause. Still Amazon has not abandoned drone R&D. Mr. Soper sees the ongoing investments as part of Amazon’s desire to shorten package delivery time beyond what has been possible so far. Amazon’s airborne drone program emerged at a time when the company was beginning to demonstrate ambitions in logistics across the board. At that time, a number of other logistics providers and tech companies began their own drone pilots. UPS began testing a vehicle in 2017 that would act as a mobile drone base, allowing drones to take off from the vehicle, deliver a package to a doorstep and return. Alphabet’s Wing Aviation in 2019 began piloting drone delivery of products from Walgreens, FedEx and some small businesses in Christianburg, VA. This month the company launched a similar pilot in Dallas, TX, its first in a major metropolitan area in the U.S. In 2020, it appeared as though the pandemic might increase the prospects of success for contact-free delivery drones. That year, UPS launched a partnership with CVS piloting the delivery of medicine to Florida’s largest retirement community via flying drone. Uber also began testing food delivery via flying drone.

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