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Amazon Prime Air debuted in 2016 as a way to deliver packages in 30 minutes
The company opened a test site in Cambridge that same year with CAA approval.
Since then, UK employees describe the project as ‘organized chaos’
Amazon’s drone delivery project was suspended after Jeff Bezos’s company decided to downsize the project team in Britain, so more than 100 employees have lost their jobs or been reassigned after the operation was called a ‘organized chaos’.
In accordance with WiredSources of the operation in the United Kingdom assured that the project “was never going to take off”, this after five years of having started with the launches of air delivery as a way to reach customers in just half an hour.
The antecedent
It was in December 2016 when an Amazon Prime Air drone made the first 13-minute flight in the UK to deliver a package; this was just a “private” test to deliver the orders of various customers.
For 2019, Amazon increased its activity and expanded the test area in Cambridge, but there was no further advance on the future of the project. However, this same year its latest Prime Air drone design was presented at its MARS (Machine Learning, Automation, Robotics and Space) Conference in Las Vegas.
Following the event, Jeff Wilke, CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer, stated in a blog post that they hoped to ‘scale Prime Air quickly and efficiently, delivering packages via drones to customers within months.’ What did not happen.
How would Amazon Prime Air work?
It is important to note that the researchers were working on allowing drones to detect humans, animals and man-made objects that were in the sky and developing 3D maps to know the location of a lawn.
The Amazon problem
Some former Prime Air team employees contacted Wired, where they noted that the project is still in place, but the work team was the main problem for the launch.
According to ex-workers, the managers supervising the drone delivery project had no technological knowledge and people were drinking at their desks due to lack of motivation.
Following that, more than 100 Cambridge employees were laid off or transferred to other projects, months after Amazon laid off dozens of employees working on the project in the United States.
“We are reorganizing a small team within our larger Prime Air organization to allow us to better align with the needs of our customers and the business,” Amazon spokeswoman Kristen Kish said in a statement to Reuters last November after the dismissal of staff in the United States.
The problems began in late 2019, when the drone team split into three divisions that analyzed the images for different threats: humans and animals, other artificial objects in the sky, and 3D mapping, which would help the drones to know where the grass is.
To do this, the company began hiring many people for its data analysis team, which was tasked with manually reviewing images from the test flight and identifying relevant threats or objects, but there was frequent turnover.
Among the difficulties was also added the construction of the drones so that they were able to land in the clients’ garden, for which they needed a heavier system, but a higher weight came with stronger regulations in the United Kingdom, as requirements. to protect people on the ground from potential collisions.
In February 2020, Wired reports, the entire human and animal data analysis team, which employed dozens of people, was shut down and reassigned, only to reopen three months later with new staff.
With this closure, the company began to restructure, permanent positions were no longer guaranteed, and everything began to be a problem within the offices.
“Everything started to collapse because they stacked too much, put people in charge who now had nothing on the project and they oversold,” said one of the former employees.
However, an Amazon spokesperson told Wired that there are still people working for Prime Air in the UK, although it declined to reveal how many employees are left within the project.
He also said the company has “rigorous procedures” in place to verify employees’ work and that “swift action” was taken in any case of misconduct.
The truth is that this situation comes at a time when Amazon remains the leader of e-commerce and other giant companies in the world, as the company consolidated its position as the most valuable brand in the world in 2021, with a estimated brand value of more than US $ 638 billion, based on Kantar.
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