Amazon’s drone delivery unit loses key FAA interlocutor: report
Efforts by Amazon to fulfill founder Jeff Bezo’s decade old vision of swiftly dispatching customer orders with a fleet of speedy, efficient delivery…
Efforts by Amazon to fulfill founder Jeff Bezo’s decade old vision of swiftly dispatching customer orders with a fleet of speedy, efficient delivery…
On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) proposed new safety standards for specific drones for package deliveries in the Federal…
Yesterday the U.S. Department of Transportation announced the 10 pilot programmes that have been approved under President Trump’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program (UAS IPP) in an effort to bring the country up to speed when it comes to drone experimentation. Yesterday we published the list of awardees and today we are reporting on the companies that made the list such as Airbus, Alphabet (Google), Apple, AT&T, Microsoft, FedEx, Uber, and others. As well as the ones that did not make the list, most notably Amazon and DJI.
Amazon Prime Air and other companies may begin delivering packages by drone as soon as this summer, according to federal regulators and industry officials. Since late last year, the White House has started to put more pressure on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to work with companies to make delivering packages by drone a reality. At the FAA UAS Symposium last week it became clear that drone deliveries may be here sooner than we think as federal officials promised drone proponents: “We’ll help you get there.”
One of the best examples of drone deliveries must be Zipline’s blood and medical supply delivery system in Rwanda. The San Francisco-based company has successfully used drones to fly “more than 187,500 miles, delivering 7,000 units of blood over 7,500 flights” since they launched their service in Africa. Could medical cargo, where to benefit from using a drone to deliver the supplies seems most obvious, open up the skies for routine drone deliveries?