Amazon.com moved one step closer to realizing its dream of using drones to deliver orders to its customers across the United States. The Federal Aviation Administration issued Amazon with an experimental airworthiness certificate last week which allows it to experiment with new drone designs for research and development and crew training.
As EETimes' Junko Yoshida explains, this may be more of a symbolic victory for Amazon than a step which takes it appreciably further down the road of commercial drone delivery:
Amazon’s certificate allows experiments with new drone designs for R&D and crew training, but not for commercial purposes. An “airworthiness certificate” is fundamentally different from the “exemptions” some drone operators have gotten from the FAA, under what’s called Section 333. Those with exemptions under Section 333 can perform commercial operations in low-risk, controlled environments...
Obviously, it wasn’t the company’s first choice, either. Critics describe an experimental airworthiness certificate as “the same document required for a private, non-commercial plane owner to fly a Cessna.”
The main benefit of receiving the FAA nod is that Amazon may now test drones outside, rather than just in an enclosed space.
Whether the future of online shopping will include automated drone delivery remains to be seen. But if Amazon can convince the FAA that its UAVs are safe enough for commercial use, the future could look like this:
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