Amazon Gets U.S. Approval for Drone Fleet, a Package-Delivery Milestone -- Update
August 31 2020 - 8:08PM
Dow Jones News
By Sebastian Herrera and Andy Pasztor
Amazon.com Inc. said Monday it received federal approval to
establish a fleet of drones and will begin limited tests of package
deliveries to customers in the U.S., although a number of key steps
remain before widespread use of the technology will be allowed.
The approval from the Federal Aviation Administration is a
milestone in Amazon's push to use unmanned aircraft to deliver
packages to global consumers. Amazon didn't say when exactly it
would begin customer tests in the U.S. The company also has testing
sites in Canada, Austria, the U.K. and other international
locations, although at the moment it can only perform tests
involving customers in the U.S. and U.K.
Routine drone deliveries to U.S. consumers are still years away,
partly because the FAA needs to complete rules for remote
identification of more than 480,000 drones currently registered for
commercial operations, and issue separate rules permitting drones
to fly regularly over populated areas.
Despite the investments and interest in potential drone
deliveries by startups as well as deep-pocketed early adapters such
as Amazon, package deliveries won't proceed beyond limited trials
in the U.S. until new federal regulations go into effect.
Amazon has now joined United Parcel Service Inc. and Wing, a
unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc., in gaining approval to operate
unmanned air fleets in the U.S. for tests involving customer
deliveries. Amazon has sought regulatory approval for a broader
range of drones and over a larger geographic area than its
competitors. The company said Monday that the approval from the FAA
isn't tied to a specific drone model but operations of a fleet.
"This is a long time coming for Amazon," former FAA
Administrator Michael Huerta said. "They are developing real-time
data, which is helpful to the [FAA] and gives Amazon a lot of
experience in working through the growing pains of getting this
business established."
Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos made the ambitious prediction
in 2013 that drone-delivered packages would arrive at the doors of
customers in five years. Although the company completed its first
test flight in England in 2016, the process has taken longer than
many top Amazon executives initially expected.
Wing last year began to deliver food and other supplies to
customers in Virginia. The company has been conducting tests in
partnership with Walgreens and FedEx Corp. UPS, which received FAA
approval to set up an airline fleet last year, has been using its
drones to carry medical supplies at a hospital network in Raleigh,
N.C. Other companies such as Uber Technologies Inc. have also
conducted limited drone-delivery tests in the U.S., although they
haven't received the level of FAA approval as Amazon, Wing and
UPS.
The drone-delivery industry has become saturated with companies.
Both startups and legacy companies have invested based on the
belief that commercial drones can speed up delivery efficiency and
will emerge as an important tool for a number of industries, from
the health-care sector to restaurants. That conviction has been
cemented by the growth in noncontact package deliveries during the
coronavirus pandemic.
Before widespread deliveries will be allowed, the FAA still
needs to establish alternate, automated air-traffic-control
networks because current systems using existing radars and human
controllers won't be able to handle the large increases in drone
operations that are expected as package-delivery options
proliferate.
Preparatory work to facilitate routine drone deliveries to
households has been under way for more than four years, and senior
FAA officials have indicated they expect White House approval and
publication of needed regulations to come before the end of the
year.
The high hopes for other pilot programs, however, haven't always
succeeded. A first-of-its-kind coordinated effort between federal,
state, local, tribal and industry participants -- unveiled with
fanfare in 2017 by the Department of Transportation -- is slated to
expire in October. The program will end without identifying a path
toward large-scale flights of drones beyond visual sight of pilots
or observers on the ground.
It has been more than a year since Amazon consumer chief Jeff
Wilke at an Amazon conference in Las Vegas said the company's
drones would be delivering packages to customers "within
months."
Amazon earlier this year hired former Boeing executive David
Carbon to lead the drone program. Mr. Carbon succeeded Gur Kimchi,
who had been important in launching the program but didn't have the
aviation background Mr. Carbon does.
Amazon said it envisions delivering packages from its warehouses
to customers in less than 30 minutes. Its latest drone design, a
hexagonal-shaped machine it unveiled last year, is designed to
carry packages weighing 5 pounds and fly a round-trip distance of
about 15 miles, according to the company.
"We will continue to develop and refine our technology to fully
integrate delivery drones into the airspace, and work closely with
the FAA and other regulators around the world to realize our vision
of 30 minute delivery," Mr. Carbon said in a written statement
Monday.
Dan Elwell, the FAA's No. 2 official, told an industry
conference in July the agency is pursuing what he called a cautious
"crawl, walk, run" strategy for opening up the skies for drones.
"We're still crawling right now," Mr. Elwell said during a virtual
conference associated with the U.K.'s Farnborough International
Airshow, adding the next phase will feature semiautonomous vehicles
flying in high-density airspace. "We're not there yet, but we're
close."
Write to Sebastian Herrera at Sebastian.Herrera@wsj.com and Andy
Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 31, 2020 20:53 ET (00:53 GMT)
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