Home > News

Amazon Drone Delivery Gets Federal Approval

By Laura Tucker
News Amazon Drone Delivery Approval Featured

After many years of research and development, Amazon drone delivery took a step closer to becoming a delivery solution for the online retailer. Federal approval couldn’t come at a better time as the embattled United States Postal Service threatens Amazon’s promised delivery times.

FAA Gives Approval to Amazon Drone Delivery

Amazon began promising two-day delivery for its Prime service, and when that service became competitive, it began offering one-day delivery. What it has been striving for, however, is thirty minutes or less.

Just think of how great that could be to place an order and receive it within 30 minutes, faster than what some grocery deliveries can provide.

On Monday, August 31, 2020, the Federal Aviation Administration said it issued a Part 135 air carrier certificate to Amazon for its Prime Air drone fleet.

Amazon did not offer any hints of when it would begin offering the service but did say obtaining FAA approval was an “important step” in the process. The company also said it would continue testing the drone delivery service.

Amazon Re:mars Prime Air Drone
(JORDAN STEAD / Amazon)

As a requirement for obtaining FAA approval, Amazon had to submit evidence of the safety of the drone delivery service and demonstrate its operation as well.

Prime Air vice president David Carbon said in a statement that the certification “indicates the FAA’s confidence in Amazon’s operating and safety procedures for an autonomous drone delivery service that will one day deliver around the world.”

Carbon also said Amazon would “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.”

Amazon showed off the prototype for the drone delivery service at a conference in Las Vegas last year. The hexagonal drone could carry up to five pounds and had advanced spatial awareness technology that allowed it to avoid other objects in flight.

Necessity of Drone Delivery

While CEO Jeff Bezos predicted in 2013 that drone delivery would be common in five years, Amazon is just the third company to receive a Part 135 air carrier certification. The others to receive it are Wing Aviation, owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company; and UPS Flight Forward.

News Amazon Drone Delivery Approval Flight

Drone delivery has not been implemented yet by any service. U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said the agency was giving $7.5. million in grants to universities for the purpose of research on “the safe integration of drones into our national airspace.”

This comes at a dire time in the U.S. Amazon depends on its own jet and van delivery service as well as the U.S. Postal Service. However, the financially-strapped U.S.P.S. has been slowed internally, threatening many essential services. Amazon getting the drone delivery approval opens up more options.

For further information on drones, read on to find how drones are saving lives.

Image Credit: Amazon

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

Octopuses possess roughly 500 million neurons distributed across their body, with two-thirds located in their arms rather than their central brain, meaning each arm can taste, problem-solve, and react to stimuli independently of whatever the octopus is otherwise paying attention to.
Explore the historic Roman bridge in lush Salamanca, Spain captured beautifully in daylight.
The Roman aqueduct at Segovia, built around the first century AD without mortar, still carried water into the 1970s, its 167 granite arches held together by nothing but the precise weight distribution of stones cut to fit each other within fractions of a millimeter.
When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.