Amazon.com Inc. plans to expand its drone delivery operation to cities in at least five more US states in the coming months, the latest step toward turning the decade-old research-and-development project into a commercial service.
Prime Air drones will start delivering packages by the end of the year from warehouses in suburban Chicago and Atlanta, as well as metro Cleveland and Syracuse, New York, Amazon said in a statement on Wednesday. The e-commerce giant currently delivers from 11 US locations, including the Houston and Dallas areas, and suburban Phoenix.
A company spokesperson declined to say how many of the new launch sites would be up and running by the end of the year, but said the drone service would reach almost 500 cities and towns in the US, a sixfold increase from the current footprint.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos disclosed his company’s drone ambitions in a 2013 interview and said they could be delivering to customers within five years. The company spent the next decade churning through drone designs and suffering a number of crashes during test flights, while reckoning with the reality that safety and space concerns would likely limit airborne delivery to suburban rather than urban areas.
The company’s MK30 drone, designed and built in-house, is a six-propeller craft that takes off and lands like a helicopter and has a range of about 7.5 miles. It has made hundreds of thousands of deliveries this year, a dramatic increase from the comparative trickle of the last few years, when the company primarily made deliveries from since-shuttered testing sites in California and Texas.
Members of Amazon’s Prime service pay $2.99 for drone delivery, with the fee waived onorders of $50 or more. Customers without a Prime membership pay a $4.99 delivery fee.
Amazon and its rival Walmart Inc. last year signaled big expansions for their drone delivery operations. Amazon has been retrofitting warehouses to accommodate its drones. Walmart, which flies drones built by partners including Alphabet Inc.’s Wing, typically launches its craft from staging areas in store parking lots.
Walmart’s expansion late last year had it on track to offer airborne delivery to metro areas that are home to roughly one in every 10 people in the US. Wing in June said it was on track to fly from more than 270 Walmart locations, within reach of more than 40 million people in the US by next year. Amazon is on the cusp of similar reach, with plans to make drone deliveries available to 30 million people by the end of 2026.
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