Introduced in 2013 by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon Prime Air drone delivery service is still not available. Yet it was one of the CEO’s key promises. Despite the 2 billion dollars spent and a team of more than 1,000 people, the development of the service is bogged down, between crashes, technical problems and numerous departures from the ranks of Amazon.
In 2013, Jeff Bezos participated in the British program 60 minutes and announced the imminent launch of a drone delivery service called Amazon Prime Air. After several years of silence, the e-commerce giant gave news of the project and unveiled in 2019 the drone that will be in charge of delivering your package in less than 30 minutes to your home.
Only and almost ten years after the initial announcement of the program, the launch of Amazon Prime Air is still pending. However, Jeff Bezos was formal and had promised that the service would make its debut during the course of 2019. This is not always the case, despite colossal investments of up to 2 billion dollars and a team of more than 1000 people spread across the world.
Also read: Amazon imagines a truck capable of deploying dozens of delivery drones
Amazon Prime Air: a bogged down project
Why such a delay? Our colleagues from the Bloomberg site conducted the investigation and obtained some answers. As internal documents, government reports, and interviews with 13 current and former employees revealed, Amazon Prime Air teams must navigate a myriad of technical challenges, from a turnover high and serious security issues.
A serious incident in June 2021 prompted federal regulators to question the airworthiness of the drone, as numerous safety features failed and the aircraft lost control, causing a forest fire along the way. According to the employees, this accident was inevitable. According to them, the pressure applied by the management of Amazon pushed project managers to take unnecessary risks.
According to Cheddi Skeete, former Amazon drone project manager, the company decided to speed up development at the expense of security. “Someone is going to have to be killed or maimed for them to take these security issues seriously. How can we speed up these tests when we know we have problems? assures this previous employee, fired according to him for having expressed his concerns to his managers. Without surprise, Amazon does not hold the same speech at all. “No one has ever been harmed or harmed as a result of these flights, and every test is conducted in compliance with all applicable regulations.” guarantees Av Zammit, spokesperson for Amazon.
Source : Bloomberg
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