Amazon says it will offer drone delivery in nearly 500 US cities and towns by the end of 2026, six times its current footprint. Its only British site, in Darlington, is under an AAIB accident investigation with its CAA permission expiring on 31 December.
Amazon says it will be delivering by drone in nearly 500 American cities and towns by the end of this year. That is six times its current reach, which is 11 sites across 10 metro areas in seven states.
Its own target is the harder number. Prime Air boss David Carbon told an internal meeting in March that the programme would make a million deliveries this year, and Amazon now says it has made hundreds of thousands.
Europe sees a smaller version of this. Amazon has one British site, in Darlington, more than a decade after it started promising the service and years after it said the first flights would reach the UK and Italy.
What it is allowed to do there is tightly bounded. The site operates on weekdays only, capped at 10 flights an hour and 100 deliveries a day, in daylight and fair weather, within a 7.5-mile radius.
It is also under investigation. An MK30 drone came down in a garden at Beaumont Hill in Darlington on 29 July, and the Air Accidents Investigation Branch has opened an accident inquiry.
Amazon’s account is that the aircraft worked. It says the drone made contact with an object extending above the roof of a moving vehicle, then landed safely, with damage limited to a hedge and a driveway and nobody hurt.
The date that matters is in December. The Civil Aviation Authority’s trial permission for Darlington expires on 31 December, so the renewal decision now lands while an accident investigation is open.
The American record is not spotless either. Two Amazon drones hit a crane in Tolleson, Arizona last October, drawing investigations from the NTSB and the FAA, and another snapped an internet cable in Waco, Texas in November.
Carbon was candid about the crane. “We trained our algorithms, we felt pretty good, but we found in the real world the performance just wasn’t good enough,” he told staff, calling it a humbling experience.
Amazon is also not the leader it once expected to be. Alphabet’s Wing passed a million commercial deliveries this year, Zipline has done two million across four continents, and Zipline and Uber are now talking about a million a day.
The gap between the two announcements is the story. Amazon can add hundreds of American towns by writing a blog post, and it cannot add a single British one without a regulator agreeing first.
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