Amazon temporarily halts drone deliveries from two facilities
Amazon is voluntarily pausing delivery of online orders via drone from hubs in two markets.
In a statement emailed to Chain Store Age, an Amazon spokesperson said the e-tail giant decided to stop drone deliveries from its Tolleson, Ariz. and College Station, Tex. fulfillment facilities on Friday, Jan. 17, 2025, for a limited-time period.
[READ MORE: Amazon launches drone delivery in Phoenix]
"We’re currently in the process of making software changes to the drone and (began) voluntarily pausing our commercial operations on Friday, Jan. 17," Amazon spokesperson Sam Stephenson said in the email. "Our services will resume once these updates are completed and approved by the FAA."
Stephenson also denied media reports which initiated in Bloomberg saying that Amazon decided to pause delivery at those two sites, which use its latest MK30 drone model, 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," Stephenson 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."
Stephenson added that the MK30 drone is designed to safely respond to “unknown events in a known way,” and said the overall architecture of the drone has performed as expected.
"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,” Stephenson said in the statement. “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.”
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.
"Safety underscores everything we do in Prime Air and our MK30 drone is safe and compliant. It’s designed to safely respond to unknown events in a known way, and the overall architecture of the drone has performed as expected."
According to Amazon, employees at both facilities will remain working and paid through this temporary pause in service.
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.