Amazon’s hopes of delivering its parcels within minutes by drone may be some way off getting off the ground in the UK.
The retail giant is said to have laid off more than 100 workers at its UK Prime Air division, many in Cambridge, where Amazon has been building and testing drone deliveries since 2016.
It has also reassigned many other team members, either abroad or to other divisions, according to Wired magazine. The project’s UK data analysis team is understood to have been made redundant.
Amazon’s Prime Air UK operations were launched five years ago following its launch in the US in 2013, with the company opening a large base in Cambridge to develop the technology. Amazon received special permission from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to test its drones and in December 2016 it made its first UK-based drone delivery, to a customer in Cambridge.
The company said at the time it would launch a pilot trial to dozens of homes in the city.
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However, there have been few public updates since then, while the Prime Air division in the US also appears to have been beset by problems. Jeff Wilke, Amazon’s head of worldwide consumer business, told an audience in Las Vegas in 2019 that drone deliveries were imminent. But last year Amazon laid off dozens of staff members in its US unit, with an insider at the time telling the Financial Times that drone deliveries at scale were still “years away”.
Insiders at the UK’s Prime Air division told Wired that the project had been “collapsing inwards” for a while and had dissolved into “organised chaos”, with one former employee saying: “It’s never going to get off the ground.”
Others reported that there had been significant levels of staff turnover, with one employee saying he had three managers in the space of a month.
Amazon’s system, under which drones deposit packages from just above the ground, caused the vehicle’s weight to rise to 27kg, according to Wired. That requires extra safety regulations to ensure people are protected from collisions.
Smaller drone operators appear to be faring better domestically. The Irish start-up Manna delivers takeaways, coffee, groceries, books and Covid tests to 10,000 residents in the town of Oranmore, outside Galway on the country’s west coast. The Irish Aviation Authority recently issued Manna a licence to operate in the rest of Europe, while the company plans to expand to locations in the UK.
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However, Professor Andy Miah at Salford University, author of Drones: The Brilliant, the Bad and the Beautiful, said it was becoming clear that grocery and parcel deliveries by drone may not be necessary in the UK.
“In places where you have significant numbers of remote or isolated communities, such as Australia, drone deliveries have been incredibly helpful,” he said, pointing to the success the Google-owned drone operator Wing had achieved there.
“But the UK market is difficult to crack because it’s quite a close country where there's a lot of other good infrastructure. Anyone who uses Amazon knows it can already get products out pretty quickly.”
Miah said it was more likely that drones would instead continue to grow in popularity for other needs, such as delivering emergency medical supplies.
“It seems a relatively safe bet that unmanned vehicles, including drones, will be absolutely central to a lot of our futures. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the actual consumer goods side of this is quite a marginal part of this future. I think grocery delivery is a bit of a red herring — it’s actually emergency medical products, or even human organs being delivered, where those things are incredibly helpful.”
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A spokesman for Amazon said: “We recently made organisational changes in our Prime Air business and were able to find positions for affected employees in other areas where we were hiring. We remain committed to our development centre in Cambridge. Prime Air continues to have employees in the UK and will keep growing its presence in the region.”
