Online e-commerce conglomerate Amazon’s delivery drone project has been grounded.
Again.
And the reason or this ‘voluntary’ suspension of operations is because two drones crashed during testing.
Again.
The company has announced a temporary suspension of its drone delivery service in Texas and Arizona after two of its MK30 drones crashed during testing at the Pendleton, Oregon airport in December.
Amazon said it was pausing all commercial drone deliveries for the foreseeable future, with one of the drones even catching fire after the crash.
The MK30, which is Amazon’s next-generation drone, is a lighter and more advanced model compared to the previous MK27. Despite its promising design, the incidents have raised questions about the reliability of the service.
“We’re currently in the process of making software changes to the drone and will be voluntarily pausing our commercial operations on Friday, Jan. 17,” said Sam Stephenson, an Amazon spokesperson, in a statement.
“These incidents occurred at our private and closed testing facility, where the purpose of these tests is to push our aircraft past their limits – it would be irresponsible not to do that.
“Our services will resume once these updates are completed and approved by the FAA.
“The incident that occurred at our Pendleton, OR facility in December 2024 is not the primary reason for our voluntary operational pause. Prime Air continued to deliver to customers safely and within federal compliance until we voluntarily paused the service on January 17.
“We expect incidents like these to occur in those tests, and they help us continue to improve the safety of our operations. Our commercial operations with the MK30 drone have been conducted safely and in compliance with all FAA regulations and requirements.”
Bloomberg reports that Amazon discovered a software issue was to blame for the crash, related to the light rain the aircraft were flying through at the time.
Cleared to commence operations by the Federal Aviation Administration last October, the drones have been delivering packages to customers’ homes in College Station, Texas, and Tolleson, Arizona, a suburb near Phoenix.
The six-propeller machine is designed to be lighter and quieter than its predecessor, the MK27-2, and fly in light rain.
“Safety underscores everything we do in Prime Air and our MK30 drone is safe and compliant,” Stephenson added.
“It’s designed to safely respond to unknown events in a known way, and the overall architecture of the drone has performed as expected.”
It is commendable that Amazon have halted operations for safety reasons; but at this stage – now approaching twelve years since the company first promised package deliveries by drone to its customers – thus umpteenth false start must be an embarrassing moment of introspection.
Of course, it is understandable that Amazon; being a $2,38trillion multinational technology company engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence; can insist on developing its own delivery drones.
But at a time where smaller scale upstarts – Zipline, Wingcopter, Swoop Aero; (and of course Wing is not that small, being an appendage of Google and all) – seem to have nailed how to keep their delivery drones in the air even during foul weather conditions, one has to wonder just what Amazon’s R&D people are doing to get their drones to blow up at every opportunity.
Amazon’s drone operation, called Prime Air, remains small — deliveries for now are limited to narrow trials in Italy, Arizona and Texas — but it aims to deliver some 500 million packages a year by the end of the decade. The unit reached a key regulatory milestone in the US last year, receiving authorisation from the FAA to fly its craft beyond their remote operators’ visual line of sight.
A test site in California was shuttered last year. Last month, the company completed its first test flight in Italy and aims to launch wider service this year. The company is also seeking clearance to begin making deliveries in the UK.
During another previously unreported episode, in early September, two aircraft collided in an apparent case of operator error. The company was testing how the MK30 would perform if one of the vehicle’s propellers failed, according to an FAA account of the incident.
Operators launched one drone at the Pendleton test range, had it complete a mock delivery and then triggered a planned motor failure. The drone began to fly to an alternate landing pad. But Amazon operators launched another test flight in error while the first was still en route to the pad.
The second drone, programmed to suffer its own motor failure during its initial ascent, started flying to the same alternate landing pad.
Recognising the sound of the second motor failure, an Amazon manager on site is said to have shouted an order for the operator to land the second craft, the FAA account said. Someone relayed the command to the designated pilot, who was monitoring both craft.
But the order apparently came too lates; the drones collided about 130 feet over the alternate landing pad, their wings interlocked and spiralled to the ground.
Amazon says it changed its operating procedures and training following the crash. The National Transportation Safety Board and FAA are investigating the September and December crashes and didn’t immediately provide comment.
“The purpose of these tests is to push our aircraft past their limits – it would be irresponsible not to do that,” Stephenson said. “We expect incidents like these to occur in those tests, and they help us continue to improve the safety of our operations.”
The drone crashes aren’t Amazon’s first. A Bloomberg investigation chronicled five incidents over a four-month period in 2021, including one that sparked a brushfire at the Pendleton airport and prompted federal regulators to question the airworthiness of the MK27-2.
Former employees said at the time that Amazon had cut corners on safety protocols in the interests of keeping tests going, including by running trials with team members who had to jump between multiple roles during a flight.
Amazon has denied this.
There were at least four additional crashes in 2022, three of which were the result of sudden power loss, according to FAA records. And in November 2023, Amazon temporarily paused operations after an MK27-2 crashed in Pendleton when its battery ran out of juice, according to an NTSB account.
The company subsequently began requiring drone operators to measure battery pack voltage as a backup to the craft’s automated monitoring.