Technology
Amazon's Prime Air drone delivery fleet receives FAA clearance for commercial trial flights
The certification of the Amazon was issued by the United States. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that will enable commercial delivery via drone testing to begin, Bloomberg reports. This qualification is the same as that given to UPS and a couple of other firms, and while it does not guarantee that Amazon will automatically start supplying customers with a commercial drone service, it does encourage them to make strides towards that target.
Amazon also said that it will conduct its own delivery experiments, but it has not shared any information about when and when exactly they will begin.
The FAA clearance for these assessments is derived from the safety laws and regulations that it implements on companies running commercial airline services, with special provisions allowing companies to overcome the standards that explicitly apply to on-board crews and aircraft employees, as drones do not have one.
These guidelines are, at best, a patchwork approach developed by the Agency and its business partners to help provide them with a means of implementing and building critical technologies and safety checks, but the FAA is moving on a more suitable set of rules regulating drone operations later this year.
This will mainly apply to having overcrowded flights — but any drone flights would still require regular human monitoring.
At the end of the day, any feasible and functional drone delivery device would need fully autonomous service, without direct line-of - sight monitoring. Amazon has plans for its MK27 drones, which have a limited carrying capacity of 5 lb, to do exactly that, but it is likely to be several years before the regulatory and air traffic control system is upgraded to a stage where this will happen on a daily basis.
