“Our goal is to reach 500 million drone deliveries per year by the end of the decade,” announces David Carbon, Vice President General Manager of Amazon Prime Air. Anticipated ten years ago by founder Jeff Bezos, by the end of 2024 the service will also arrive in Italy, the first country outside the USA, together with the United Kingdom.
Amazon’s drones arrive from Seattle, seriously: “They will make the first deliveries to Italy by 2024”
The choice
But why Italy? For several reasons: “First, we have a great working relationship and a great customer base. Then there is a very clear structure regarding the regulatory bodies, and this makes it easier to start a project like this. The third thing that Italy has is a perfect environment, a territory that suits what we want to do and experience and Amazon has been very well received from the beginning,” explains Carbon. Also because, in 13 years of activity, the company has invested heavily, creating more than 18,000 permanent jobs in over 60 locations. “And finally, the choice is dictated by the long Italian tradition in the aerospace field, with Finmeccanica and Leonardo and we like to work in countries at the forefront of the sector”.
Less noise
When asked directly, Carbon specifies that the two companies had no role in the Mark 30 project, the most recent and advanced of Amazon’s drones presented yesterday in Seattle.
As tall as a person, equipped with six electric motors, it rises vertically like a helicopter and then flies horizontally, like a plane. “The previous model, Mark 27, was designed to be twice as safe as all other aircraft. This is hundreds of times safer than driving to the store to buy something, and the comparison with general aviation is unrealistic.” The latest drone is faster than the Mark 27, but it is “lighter, producing 40% less noise thanks to a new propeller design, and it is designed in such a way as to function even if some parts were damaged.”
A possible aviation museum
Dozens of prototypes hang from the ceilings of the Seattle research center: some have tennis balls on their feet to cushion the impact upon landing, others look like planes from the 1920s, or unlikely crosses between a missile and a fan. “From generation to generation, the structure of the drone evolves to adapt to the environment, it’s a bit like Amazon, which over the years has shown a great ability to change,” observes Carbon. “Hundreds of experts work to create a device capable of sending customers an order within 60 minutes of clicking on the site”. With Prime Air, available at no extra charge to customers in some areas of California and Texas, a thousand deliveries were made in four months. In the USA, Walmart has also launched a similar service.
The rules
The new drone will be used, at least initially, in areas not far from an Amazon warehouse: typically the outskirts of a large city. The package with the purchased goods (for a maximum weight of 2300 grams) is not placed on the ground, but dropped from three or four meters high, into a courtyard or onto a balcony.
The Mark 30 is equipped with sensors to detect any obstacles: it chooses the route autonomously, but is followed by specialized personnel, always ready to make it return to base or land in case of emergency. “We worked closely with European and Italian regulatory authorities, and we found clarity and competence,” continues Carbon.
“We are available and in support of projects such as Amazon’s, aware of our role not only as a service provider but as a true strategic partner in an industrial logic”, declared the CEO of the Enav Group, Pasqualino Monti, commenting the launch of Prime Air in Italy. “Enav, the Italian company that manages traffic, has for some time no longer looked only at air traffic control, but at the management of airspace as an infrastructure available for the economic growth of the country”. Medicines will arrive with drones, but the AirTaxi is also around the corner, which should debut as early as the 2025 Jubilee. So the Mark 30, as Carbon observes, “is a starting point, not an arrival point”: fundamental however it will involve people and communities. “We will continue these collaborations in the future. It will be a gradual process, we will work to explain clearly what it is about.” Starting from the beginning: those sorts of white and blue mini helicopters buzzing in the sky don’t come from another planet.