Amazon resumes drone deliveries
A voluntary pause on delivery of online orders via drone at Amazon has been lifted.
The online giant, which decided to stop drone deliveries from its Tolleson, Ariz. and College Station, Texas fulfillment facilities on Friday, Jan. 17, 2025, for a limited-time period, resumed them last week following a software update to its latest MK30 drone model, which is used at those sites.
In a corporate blog post, Amazon senior editor Alex Davies said during drone delivery flights in the Phoenix area (served by its Tolleson facility) it discovered that environmental factors like dust can sometimes interfere with the readings of an altitude sensor in the drone.
[READ MORE: Amazon launches drone delivery in Phoenix]
Although Davies said Amazon had never experienced a safety issue from the sensor, the company decided to proactively enhance its drone fleet and voluntarily pause operations across the fleet while making those improvements.
"This is a normal part of our rigorous internal safety and engineering processes," said Davies in the blog post. "We’ve now made the enhancements, rigorously tested them, and received FAA approval so we’re back up in the skies delivering to customers."
According to Amazon, other safety testing included flying airplanes and helicopters at the drones to test their ability to sense and avoid aircraft at different routes, angles, heights and speeds in various scenarios; as well as stopping the MK30’s motor, its electronic speed controller, or a propeller, to verify it can stay in flight, safely return to the launch site, and land at a designated pad that’s reserved for such circumstances.
In a January 2025 email to Chain Store Age, Amazon denied previous media reports which initiated in Bloomberg saying that it decided to pause delivery at those two sites because two MK30 drones crashed in light rain at a testing facility in Pendleton, Ore., in December 2024.
"The incident that occurred at our Pendleton, Ore. facility in December 2024 is not the primary reason for our voluntary operational pause," an Amazon spokesperson said in the statement. "Prime Air continued to deliver to customers safely and within federal compliance until we voluntarily paused the service on Jan. 17."
According to New York Post coverage of the Bloomberg article, one of the drones caught fire when it crashed. The New York Post also reported that an additional crash of two Amazon drones in flight due to operator error occurred in September 2024.
The Amazon MK30 drone – a primer
Engineers and aerospace experts on Amazon’s Prime Air team spent nearly two years building the MK30 from a blank slate. The development phase started with safety and reliability criteria that culminated in a perception system developed to detect and avoid obstacles, reduce noise, and provide redundant flight-critical systems that ensure no single point of failure could cause loss of control of the drone.
The development team tested the drone for basic flight functions to validate their aerodynamic and flight control models in an eight-month process that incorporated the full production hardware and software for regulatory approval.
The team also created a fully redundant system for all safety-critical features, including a separate monitoring computer that tracks the primary flight control algorithm. If the monitoring system detects anomalies midflight, it can immediately transfer control to a backup controller and trigger a safe return-to-home sequence.
To reach the Prime Air team’s standards, the drone went through 1,070 flight hours on more than 6,300 flights on the MK30: first with a tethered flight, then flying in a caged area, and finally an untethered outdoor flight.
The final outdoor phase was monitored by the FAA at Amazon’s Pendleton, Ore. drone testing site. Amazon's flight test campaign culminated in 360 hours of FAA certification flights to achieve the team's goals.
The MK30 received FAA approval to begin operations to customers in October 2024. The approval included the ability to fly beyond visual line of sight, using Prime Air's on-board detect and avoid system, from the first day of operation at a new location.
Amazon has set a goal of having drones deliver 500 million packages globally by the end of the decade.
"Testing is a game of one-upmanship, where each evolution in the design or use of a product requires a similar evolution in how it’s proven safe, and where we’re always asking ourselves what other situation could we possibly encounter, and how do we get ahead of it?," said Davies in the blog post. "So we learn more, study more, and get ready to ace the next test."
