Amazon has applied to the Civil Aviation Authority to extend its Prime Air drone delivery service to the whole of Darlington, the County Durham town where it has been flying under a limited permission since February.
The BBC reports that the company "has put an application in to expand its drone delivery service to cover an entire town where it has been trialling the tech". Darlington is Prime Air's first site outside the United States. The current service reaches customers "within a 7.5 mile radius" of Amazon's site there, and the application follows "more than 500 flights and deliveries".
David Carbon, vice-president of Prime Air, told PA Media that Amazon expects to get permission "very soon", and that the ultimate objective is to bring the service to the whole of the UK. Amazon has not said when a decision is due, and neither the BBC nor PA carries a statement from the CAA.
What the service looks like today
Eligible customers in Darlington can receive items within two hours, provided the package weighs less than 5lb and, in the BBC's words, "it can fit inside a large shoebox". Prime Air is available to customers with a garden, yard or driveway. PA reports that staff at the site say their best delivery time so far is 39 minutes.
Carbon told PA the size and weight limits made about 68% of the items people order eligible for drone delivery. At checkout, customers see a satellite map of their property with pre-identified "delivery zones", pick one, and are reminded to keep it clear.
In the UK the service is currently included in an Amazon Prime membership with no extra delivery fee. PA reports that this will be evaluated as the service expands, and quotes Carbon as saying the firm was "working through those details" but it would "not be much of an extra cost".
Safety, the July crash and the weather
An investigation was launched in July after a Prime Air drone delivering a package crashed into a garden in Darlington. Amazon said no-one was injured and that its initial assessment was that an object extending above the roof of a moving vehicle "inadvertently came into contact with a Prime Air drone during delivery". A spokesperson said "the drone responded as designed and came safely to the ground".
Carbon told PA there had been "some" Prime Air incidents but "it's not a percentage that is high at all". He said: "In an aerospace programme, you design to the safety level that you want, and our safety level is one commensurate with one that's laid out through the regulatory framework, and that's what we designed with."
On the aircraft's visibility to the public, he said: "When you're up around 400 feet or 130 metres, they're really hard to pick out." On weather, he said: "We've designed for light rains, light snow, wind gusts, up to the 28mph mark… but like all aerospace… you'd not take off when the weather's not suitable to fly, and this is no different." PA reports that a planned demonstration for local stakeholders could not go ahead because of high winds.
The permission being widened
Trade reporting sets out the shape of the current permission. DroneXL and The Next Web both report that the CAA authorised the Darlington flights on a trial basis, capped at 10 flights an hour and 100 deliveries a day on weekdays, in daylight and fair weather, with the permission expiring on 31 December.
DroneXL's reading of this week's application is that the geography is the only part that has been made public. It writes: "Neither Amazon nor the CAA has said whether the application also lifts the 10-flights-per-hour rate or the 100-delivery daily cap, and those are the numbers that decide whether Darlington becomes a service or a larger demonstration." It also describes the application as "the first time Amazon has asked the regulator to widen the box instead of flying inside it".
Why it matters to UK operators
This is a live application to widen a drone delivery permission in UK airspace, made by an operator already flying under one, with the regulator's existing trial permission due to lapse at the end of the year. How the CAA handles the town-wide request, and whether it renews or reshapes the Darlington permission in December, will be read closely by every operator trying to build a routine delivery case of their own.
For operators in and around Darlington, a town-wide footprint would also mean Prime Air aircraft over a much larger area than the current radius, and the sources do not say what, if anything, changes for other airspace users as a result.
What the sources do not say
None of the coverage carries a statement from the CAA on the application, a date by which it will decide, or the text of what Amazon has asked for. Whether the hourly and daily caps move with the geography is unanswered, as DroneXL notes. Amazon's own figure for the number of incidents behind Carbon's "some" is not given in any of the reporting. Anyone planning around a town-wide Prime Air service in Darlington should treat all of those as open.