Skip to main content

Your drone delivery dream is one step closer: Amazon gets testing permission for Prime Air

Jeff Bezos’s dream of one day seeing Prime Air delivery drones buzzing out of Amazon distribution centers edged a little closer on Thursday as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave the company the green light to conduct outdoor test flights of its unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).

The FAA said it’d issued the company with an “experimental airworthiness certificate” that allows Amazon to operate its UAV “for research and development and crew training.”

Recommended Videos

With safety in mind, the administration’s certificate stipulates that the Web company can not fly its drone any higher than 400 feet (122 meters), and that all tests must be carried out during daylight hours.

In addition, test pilots “must have at least a private pilot’s certificate and current medical certification,” the FAA said, and must keep the UAV within sight at all times.

The aviation body further stipulated that Amazon has to provide it with monthly data detailing the number of flights conducted, pilot duty time per flight, unusual hardware or software issues, any deviations from instructions given by air traffic controllers, and any unintended loss of communication links.

Pressure

The e-commerce giant had been pressing the FAA for clearance to test its Prime Air drone since last July, seven months after it first unveiled the ambitious plan.

Frustrated by the administration’s apparent lack of movement on the issue, and in an effort to apply pressure on the agency, Paul Misener, Amazon’s VP of global public policy, threatened to move the company’s testing program overseas, taking research funds and jobs with it. Indeed, the company has already announced plans for a new R&D center in the UK, with much of its work expected to focus on Prime Air.

Most commercial drone flights in the U.S. are currently banned. However, with the technology becoming more reliable as well as affordable, many businesses are keen to make use of it. With this in mind, the FAA is now working on a set of guidelines for the commercial use of drones, although, to the frustration of many companies, it may be some time before the rules are implemented.

While Amazon will be relieved that it now has greater freedom to test its drones in the U.S., it knows that even if it can design what it considers to be a safe and efficient drone-based delivery service, there are still countless regulatory hoops to jump through before it can ever become a reality.

[Source: FAA]

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Amazon Air adding 12 more cargo jets so you can get your order more quickly
Amazon Prime Air

 

Amazon is adding 12 Boeing 737 aircraft to its dedicated fleet of cargo jets. The company said the move would help it to cope more efficiently with evolving demand and a growing customer base.

Read more
Google Gemini’s best AI tricks finally land on Microsoft Copilot
Copilot app for Mac

Microsoft’s Copilot had a rather splashy AI upgrade fest at the company’s recent event. Microsoft made a total of nine product announcements, which include the agentic trick called Actions, Memory, Vision, Pages, Shopping, and Copilot Search. 

A healthy few have already appeared on rival AI products such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, alongside much smaller players like Perplexity and browser-maker Opera. However, two products that have found some vocal fan-following with Gemini and ChatGPT have finally landed on the Copilot platform. 

Read more
Rivian set to unlock unmapped roads for Gen2 vehicles
rivian unmapped roads gen2 r1t gallery image 0

Rivian fans rejoice! Just a few weeks ago, Rivian rolled out automated, hands-off driving for its second-gen R1 vehicles with a game-changing software update. Yet, the new feature, which is only operational on mapped highways, had left many fans craving for more.
Now the company, which prides itself on listening to - and delivering on - what its customers want, didn’t wait long to signal a ‘map-free’ upgrade will be available later this year.
“One feedback we’ve heard loud and clear is that customers love [Highway Assist] but they want to use it in more places,” James Philbin, Rivian VP of autonomy, said on the podcast RivianTrackr Hangouts. “So that’s something kind of exciting we’re working on, we’re calling it internally ‘Map Free’, that we’re targeting for later this year.”
The lag between the release of Highway Assist (HWA) and Map Free automated driving gives time for the fleet of Rivian vehicles to gather ‘unique events’. These events are used to train Rivian’s offline model in the cloud before data is distilled back to individual vehicles.
As Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe explained in early March, HWA marked the very beginning of an expanding automated-driving feature set, “going from highways to surface roads, to turn-by-turn.”
For now, HWA still requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road. The system will send alerts if you drift too long without paying attention. But stay tuned—eyes-off driving is set for 2026.
It’s also part of what Rivian calls its “Giving you your time back” philosophy, the first of three pillars supporting Rivian’s vision over the next three to five years. Philbin says that philosophy is focused on “meeting drivers where they are”, as opposed to chasing full automation in the way other automakers, such as Tesla’s robotaxi, might be doing.
“We recognize a lot of people buy Rivians to go on these adventures, to have these amazing trips. They want to drive, and we want to let them drive,” Philbin says. “But there’s a lot of other driving that’s very monotonous, very boring, like on the highway. There, giving you your time back is how we can give the best experience.”
This will also eventually lead to the third pillar of Rivian’s vision, which is delivering Level 4, or high-automation vehicles: Those will offer features such as auto park or auto valet, where you can get out of your Rivian at the office, or at the airport, and it goes off and parks itself.
While not promising anything, Philbin says he believes the current Gen 2 hardware and platforms should be able to support these upcoming features.
The second pillar for Rivian is its focus on active safety features, as the EV-maker rewrote its entire autonomous vehicle (AV) system for its Gen2 models. This focus allowed Rivian’s R1T to be the only large truck in North America to get a Top Safety Pick+ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
“I believe there’s a lot of innovation in the active safety space, in terms of making those features more capable and preventing more accidents,” Philbin says. “Really the goal, the north star goal, would be to have Rivian be one of the safest vehicles on the road, not only for the occupants but also for other road users.”

Read more