Over the past few weeks, concerned New Jersey residents have craned their heads skyward to track the movements of what appeared to be mysterious drones overhead, formulate theories about their origins and strategize about how to get rid of them.
A few thousand miles away, just west of Phoenix, Amazon is on an ambitious quest to convince people that the 80-pound drones whirring over their houses not only are harmless but represent the exciting future of online shopping.
You may have heard about Amazon’s drones before. The company first teased them more than a decade ago, when Jeff Bezos went on “60 Minutes” to declare the start of Prime Air, an experimental drone delivery service that the company hoped would one day deliver millions of packages to customers in 30 minutes or less.
For Amazon addicts, the pitch was irresistible. Need a phone charger? Forgot your toothpaste on a work trip? Tap a button, Mr. Bezos said, and an autonomous drone would zoom through the sky to deliver it to you, in less time than it would take you to drive to the store.
That future didn’t arrive on schedule, however, and Mr. Bezos is now more focused on sending rockets to space. But Amazon hasn’t given up on drones. This week, I was invited along with my “Hard Fork” co-host, Casey Newton, to tour the facility where Amazon just launched the newest iteration of Prime Air, and see its new drones in action.
Our tour was awkwardly timed — smack-dab in the middle of a national panic over the drones hovering over New Jersey. (For what it’s worth, Amazon officials say the mystery drones aren’t theirs. Federal officials said this week that most of the reported sightings had turned out to be piloted planes and hobby drones, although some remain unexplained.)
But Amazon is undeterred. The company believes that the convenience of drone delivery will outweigh any concerns people have about the drones themselves.
“Any form of technology needs to have utility,” said David Carbon, Amazon’s vice president and general manager of Prime Air, who served as our tour guide for the day. “If it doesn’t have utility for the general populace, it’s a nuisance.”
We tested that theory by ordering a drone delivery of something called Brazilian Bum Bum Cream to a house in the Phoenix suburbs that Amazon had rented for the day. The cream is one of about 60,000 products that can be ordered for drone delivery, all of which weigh five pounds or less and fit into a standard-size Prime Air box. (Despite the suggestive name, Brazilian Bum Bum Cream is used on many body parts.)
Our delivery went smoothly. It also inspired a visit from a neighbor, whose reaction proved that the public may not be as excited as Amazon is about a drone-filled future. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
A Drone Dream, Deferred
Back in 2013, when Mr. Bezos made his pitch on “60 Minutes,” Amazon’s drones weren’t really ready for prime time.
For starters, the company had yet to receive regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to operate a drone delivery program. (That approval didn’t come until 2020, when the agency authorized Prime Air to operate as an airline and deliver small packages via drone. The approval was expanded to include deliveries “beyond visual line of sight” this year.)
The drones themselves also had issues — they had limited range and carrying capacity, couldn’t fly in heavy rain or wind and made a ton of noise. They were also inefficient as a delivery vehicle. Unlike vans and trucks packed wall to wall with boxes, a Prime Air drone could deliver only one package at a time.
There were safety concerns, too. In 2022, Bloomberg reported that an Amazon drone testing facility in Pendleton, Ore., had recorded five drone crashes in a four-month period, including one involving a drone that burst into flames and ignited a 25-acre brush fire. (No one was hurt, and the company characterized the incidents as part of routine testing.)
In 2020, Amazon hired Mr. Carbon, a longtime aviation executive, to overhaul Prime Air and turn its original vision into reality. (Mr. Carbon left Boeing, where he oversaw the company’s 787 Dreamliner factory in South Carolina, after a New York Times article detailed rushed production practices and weak oversight there.)
In 2022, Prime Air started drone delivery with real customers in College Station, Texas. The program proved that the company’s drones could fly safely, but it wasn’t a hit with customers, in part because signing up for drone deliveries was so cumbersome.
Before sending drones to customers’ houses, Amazon employees had to visit the houses to find a clear spot for dropping packages. Customers were given printed cards with QR codes on them, which they’d place in their yards or driveways to help guide the drones to the right spot.
The whole thing felt more like an elaborate marketing stunt than a preview of an inevitable future. (Around that time, my colleague David Streitfeld memorably described Prime Air as “a program that flies Listerine Cool Mint Breath Strips or a can of Campbell’s Chunky Minestrone With Italian Sausage — but not both at once — to customers as gifts.”)
Recently, Amazon has developed a new drone — known as the MK-30 — that it claims solves many of the problems with previous models. The new drones fly twice as far, and the company says they are significantly quieter. The drones can also identify where to drop packages with the help of cameras and sensors, which means no more yard surveys or QR codes.
This year, Amazon began offering drone delivery from a facility in Tolleson, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix — where, as in Texas, the skies are typically sunny and clear, making for optimal flying conditions. Its drones now deliver dozens of packages a day to real, paying customers in the West Valley Phoenix Metro area — a tiny fraction of what even one Amazon van could do, but a step toward fulfilling Mr. Bezos’ original vision.
The Blades of Progress
Once we arrived in Tolleson, Mr. Carbon gave us safety vests and took us on a tour of the Prime Air facility. The facility is housed in a back corner of an Amazon warehouse that I would be tempted to describe as “huge,” except that a company press official told me it was smaller than a typical fulfillment center.
Outside, in a fenced area known as the PADDC, for Prime Air Drone Delivery Center, a fleet of roughly a dozen MK-30 drones sat ready for takeoff. They were tear-shaped and gleaming white, with big blue Amazon logos and six, three-blade rotors surrounding the delivery compartment. These custom-designed drones are bigger and heavier than anything you’d see on the shelf at Best Buy — each MK-30 weighs 80 pounds, and is roughly the size and shape of a Labrador retriever. And they fly at speeds of up to 73 miles per hour.
As soon as a Prime Air order comes in, a worker inside the warehouse packs it in a special, cushioned box and sends it down a conveyor belt. Another worker walks the package outside to the drone delivery area, drops it into a size checker and slides it through a chute to a worker inside the fence. That worker then loads the box into a compartment inside the drone. A 30-second countdown begins. When it reaches zero, the drone’s blades start whirring, and the drone ascends to roughly 400 feet and makes a beeline to the customer’s house.
Getting these drones off the ground has required making some compromises. Today, Amazon can launch only seven drones per hour from the Tolleson facility, and each can carry only one package, with a single item inside. That will change next year, when customers will have the option of adding multiple items to a box, Mr. Carbon said.
Amazon charges Prime members an extra $9.99 for a drone delivery (nonmembers pay $14.99), and the drones don’t deliver at night. The company also has had to walk back Mr. Bezos’ original promise of 30-minute deliveries — it now tells customers their Prime Air packages will arrive in an hour or less.
And drone delivery, for now, appears to be deeply unprofitable. Mr. Carbon wouldn’t say how much Amazon lost on each delivery, but Business Insider reported in 2022 that the company projected that drone deliveries would cost the company $63 per package by 2025, according to internal documents.
Mr. Carbon, an upbeat Australian, is optimistic that all of this will change soon, as Amazon’s technology keeps improving and the service expands to more areas. His goal is to deliver 500 million packages a year in 30 minutes or less via drone by 2029 — which would still amount to a small fraction of the company’s overall package volume, but would be a huge success for Prime Air. (Amazon says Prime Air has made “thousands” of deliveries in Arizona and Texas so far, but declined to provide more specific numbers.)
Amazon isn’t the only company betting on drones. Companies like Wing (Google’s drone delivery unit) and Zipline are teaming up with retailers like Walmart to test their own drone delivery programs. And outfits like DroneUp and Matternet are building technology that could allow for smoother operation of large, autonomous drone fleets.
As for the question you may be asking about all of this — do people want drones dropping packages in their yards? — Mr. Carbon has an answer: Yes, at least some people, some of the time.
He conceded that not every customer would want all purchases delivered right away. But he said there were plenty of instances when you wanted something as soon as possible. (He gave the example of a child who spills something on his or her shirt — with Prime Air, a parent could order a bar of soap and receive it from a drone in minutes, before the stain sets.)
“No one can ever tell me speed doesn’t matter,” he said.
It’s hard to argue with Mr. Carbon on this point: In America, it’s never a good idea to bet against convenience. We live in a world of instant gratification: DoorDash dinners and Uber rides at the push of a button. And historically, every time Amazon has sped up its deliveries — first to two-day shipping, then to next-day, then to same-day — customers have responded by ordering more stuff, and demanding that it be delivered even faster.
Even so, I wondered, isn’t using state-of-the-art drones to deliver USB cables and individual bottles of Tylenol a little … crazy? On our tour of the Prime Air facility, we saw drones being loaded with packages containing items as small as a single gift card. Even if these drones (which are all-electric) are better for the environment than a typical delivery truck, it’s an awful lot of trouble for a last-minute present.
I asked Mr. Carbon if he thought that some of what customers were ordering from Prime Air was less than essential. He responded, basically, that what customers wanted was none of Amazon’s business.
“The beauty of America is that people decide what they want and when they want it, not us,” he said.
A Smooth Landing, and a Nosy Neighbor
After our tour of the facility, we drove to a house in nearby Goodyear, Ariz., that Amazon had rented for the day to show us a real drone delivery in action.
When we got there, I pulled out my laptop and placed an order for Brazilian Bum Bum Cream — one of the first items that appeared on a list of Prime Air-eligible products. (Other eligible products include dog treats, dental floss and printed copies of the U.S. Constitution.)
The checkout process was similar to ordering anything else from Amazon, with one extra step of selecting a spot for the drone to drop the package. Today, the drones need about three square meters of open space — I chose a spot in the backyard, next to the pool.
About 45 minutes after I placed my order, a drone whizzed overhead. It made a distinct humming noise — which Mr. Carbon insisted wasn’t very loud but to me sounded like an angry swarm of bees — and generated a slight breeze as it approached.
Once it was over our heads, the drone descended to about 14 feet off the ground. A compartment sprang open, and the package dropped out. (The drones don’t land, Mr. Carbon said, because customers — or their dogs — might try to grab them.) Then, as speedily as it had arrived, the drone flew away.
I’ll admit: It’s an impressive feat, and everything about the drone delivery was as smooth and convenient as advertised. But it also attracted some unwanted attention. Seconds after our package landed, a neighbor came over. He introduced himself as Geno, and asked if we were from Amazon. He said people in the neighborhood had started to associate the whirring of drones overhead with the mystery drones in New Jersey.
“You guys scared the life out of a lot of people,” he told Mr. Carbon.
Changing the Fear Factor
Today, people simply aren’t accustomed to seeing drones hovering above them, which makes them seem sinister and menacing, and often leaves people grasping for paranoid explanations. (Aliens! Covert military operations! Missing radioactive material!)
That may change soon. As the government pointed out during its investigation into the New Jersey drones, there are more than a million F.A.A.-registered drones certified to fly in the United States today, and millions more small, recreational drones that can be flown without a license. Drones are getting cheaper and more accessible, and small, lightweight quadcopters can now be purchased for under $100. In a few years, it may no longer seem notable to see a swarm of drones overhead — taking photos, dropping off packages or delivering medicine to hospitals.
But technology changes faster than culture, and initial evidence suggests that drone acceptance won’t be immediate. A Florida man was arrested this year for shooting down a Walmart delivery drone that was dropping off a package in his neighborhood. (The man agreed to pay $5,000 in restitution to DroneUp, the company that owned the drone.)
Referring to the recent drama of drones in New Jersey, President-elect Donald J. Trump suggested on social media that one solution would be to “shoot them down.” (Mr. Carbon said that none of Amazon’s drones had been shot at, but that the company would prosecute anyone who tried.)
Over the long term, Amazon’s job isn’t just to prove that it can deliver packages to customers in 30 minutes or less. It’s something much harder — convincing millions of Americans that when they see and hear drones overhead, their first instinct shouldn’t be to duck and cover, or to reach for their guns.
“Our job is to make this normal,” Mr. Carbon said. “And until it’s normal, people are always rightfully skeptical of change.”
If it works, Amazon’s drone program — and others like it — will represent the biggest visible change to our skies since the advent of commercial air travel. If it doesn’t, the industry will have spent billions of dollars learning a hard lesson about our collective tolerance for flocks of flying robots.
Given what’s happening in New Jersey, I’m skeptical that normalizing drones will be easy or quick, even for a company with Amazon’s resources and track record. But Mr. Carbon believes that the proof will be in the packages.
“If I do my job right, no one’s going to care about the drone,” he said. “What they’re going to care about is: Did I get my package within 30 minutes?”
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