The one thing standing between Amazon and its ability to expand the range of its drone delivery program was U.S. regulators.
According to a posting on Amazon’s website Thursday, that hurdle has been cleared.
Bloomberg reported that Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime Air drone program has been cleared by regulators to fly devices beyond the visual line of sight of pilots, increasing range and giving more customers access to the service.
The approval allows Prime Air to scale deliveries in the US, Amazon said on its website Thursday. According to the Bloomberg report, the company will expand the area it services with unmanned aerial vehicles in College Station, Texas, and will start integrating such shipments into its same-day delivery network this year.
Amazon is the latest company to gain approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly drones more freely amid the proliferation of rapid delivery services. UAVs offer a potentially faster, cheaper way to deliver small parcels than paying drivers to fight through traffic and find parking. Amazon, Alphabet Inc. and Walmart Inc. have all invested in drones with mixed success.
Amazon is seeking to deliver 500 million packages a year by drone by the end of the decade, according to Bloomberg. It delivered more than 4 billion units on the same or next day to Prime members in the US in 2023.
In its website announcement regarding the FAA’s clearance, Amazon said it has spent years “developing, testing, and refining our onboard detect-and-avoid system to ensure our drones can detect and avoid obstacles in the air.”
