Amazon Prime Air will start delivering packages with drones later this year

The Amazon Prime Air drone delivery program will start this year in Lockeford, California. However, the pilot still requires final approval from the FAA and local government.

Customers in Lockeford will be able to see which products are eligible for Prime Air via the webshop from the start date of the pilot. A delivery time is then given, after which the drone must deliver the ordered package to the customer’s garden at the set time.

Amazon makes in the program announcement no further details are known about the scope of the service. It is also not yet entirely clear what kind of packages customers can order, although the web shop giant promises that ‘thousands of everyday products’ can be ordered via Prime Air. The packages in question will have to meet a certain weight limit, but no information is known about this either.

In previous, smaller-scale tests, packages of a maximum of a few kilograms and good weather conditions were required; then a package could be delivered within thirty minutes. In the meantime, several new versions of the delivery drone have already been released, which undoubtedly influenced the parameters.

The Amazon Prime Air program has been roughly a decade in the making and has run into significant problems in recent years. In addition to the unissued approval, the Part 135 Certificate of the Federal Aviation Administration, several technical problems with the actual delivery drone are also said to have prevented the program, such as wrote Bloomberg recently. The project was announced in 2013 by then-founder Jeff Bezos and was set to get off the ground “not until 2015.”

Amazon’s latest delivery drone, the Mk27-2, uses a hexagonal design and six propellers