In 2013 amazon promised to use drones to deliver purchases for its users in just 30 minutes. However, almost a decade later, the company is still far from effectively implementing the program announced with great fanfare by Jeff Bezos. A recent report from Bloomberg states that the company would have encountered multiple difficulties to achieve the expected PrimeAir have success; this would not only be due to technical problems and incidents during the flight tests, but also to the negative impact that the lack of progress and safety issues would have had on the employees involved.
According to the aforementioned media, until now Amazon has allocated more than 2,000 million dollars to its drone program. But not even such an amount of money, added to a team of more than a thousand members, would be enough to bring the company closer to making its almost immediate delivery plan a reality.
Since the initial announcement, Amazon has not only changed the design of its drones, but also the one in charge of driving their development. Guru Kimchi was in charge of this initiative in its early years, while David Carbon He took the post in March 2020 after a long journey as a Boeing manager. However, the work of the latter would have been under scrutiny by the company’s own employees for allegedly prioritize speed of development over security.
It is clear that Amazon is not the only company that bets on drones to innovate in product deliveries. Other large technology firms have also been developing similar proposals for several years, and some —Samsung, for example— have already launched them, but in a very limited way. It is a reality that the definitive implementation of this type of strategy is not only tied to technical advances and the reliability of unmanned vehicles, or to the investment made by each company, but also to the approval of the aeronautical authorities of each country. And the latter is the most difficult, without a doubt.
Almost a decade after its announcement, Amazon drones do not take off
Bloomberg mentions how technical issues would have been a major headache for Amazon’s drone program during 2021. He specifically mentions that five accidents were recorded in the same test site, in the course of just four months. Of this amount, two would have been the most worrying.
One, apparently occurred in May, would have happened when a propeller of the drone came off, causing the device to fall to the ground. The most striking thing here is that Amazon supposedly cleaned up the scene before the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) arrived at the scene, although the company denied that it had acted with malicious intent, but rather following the instructions of the competent authorities.
The other would have occurred in June after an unmanned aircraft engine was turned off. According to what was published, the systems that were supposed to counteract the inconvenience did not work and that caused the device to fall. After the impact, the drone would have caught fire and the fire would have spread for an area of just over 10 hectares.
The problems would not be only technical
Amazon’s troubled drone program would also have taken its toll on the people involved. The increase in the number of accidents during the tests would have given a boost to the departure of several employees they were part of a team.
Bloomberg assures that many of the workers involved in Prime Air chose to be relocated to other branches of the company; mainly on Amazon Web Services. Others would have preferred to abandon it. There would also have been a higher rate of layoffs under the leadership of David Carbon, exceeding 200 in 2021 alone.
A former employee named cheddi skeete He says he was fired after raising concerns about security issues as part of Amazon’s drone team. They would not only have been related to failures during flights and suspicions about the actual compliance with the maintenance of the devices; he would also have revealed inappropriate working conditionssuch as the lack of toilets in the places where the tests were carried out.
For now, Amazon came out at the crossroads of several statements published by Bloomberg. The company assured that security is its main priority and that all work is carried out following regulatory frameworks. “We take safety reporting seriously; we have a system in place that is well known to all of our team members, and we encourage them to raise any suggestions and concerns about it,” reads a statement sent to TheVergemedium that also echoed this story.