Amazon has revealed which British town will be the first location to see parcels delivered by drones, eight years after the first flight was trialled.
Darlington has been chosen as the first UK location to trial flights from a fulfillment centre on the outskirts of the town.
The company has used drones to deliver packages since 2022 in the US.
However, in 2021 aerial shots revealed a desolate site for Amazon’s UK drone delivery scheme after the project was ground to a halt after the online giant cut back its team in Britain.
The online giant then revealed that their Prime Air service would begin from one of its UK same-day delivery sites at the end of 2024.
Before any drone flights can take off, the company still needs permission from the local council and Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).
The company said once those agreements are made, they will begin hiring staff members to launch the service.
In a statement the company added that they will ‘engage with the Darlington community to answer questions and collect feedback’ before the service is launched.
Amazon’s Air Prime drones could soon be delivering parcels to customers in Darlington
Amazon still requires permission from the local council and the CAA before flights can begin
The Civil Aviation Authority has still to come up with rules on how commercial drones can safely be used for deliveries.
Amazon acknowledged there was still much work to do but said it was ‘ready and excited’.
‘We have built safe and reliable drone delivery services elsewhere in the world in close relationship with regulators and the communities we serve, and we are working to do the same in the UK,’ it said in a statement.
It is part of a rollout which will also see Prime Air introduced in Italy and expanded to a third state in the US, with drone deliveries already operating in California and Texas.
The process for drone deliveries in the UK has been slowly developing for around eight years.
In December 2016, an Amazon Prime Air drone made a 13-minute flight in Cambridgeshire to drop off its first package. The flight was the first in a ‘private’ trial to deliver packages to a number of customers.
By 2019, the company appeared to increase their activity and expanded the testing area in Cambridge but there were few updates on when the project would launch.
Eventually, more than 100 employees at the Cambridge office lost their jobs and dozens of others were moved to other projects, Wired reported.
Former employees at the company said the project had been ‘collapsing inwards,’ ‘dysfunctional,’ and ‘resembled organized chaos,’ run by managers who were ‘detached from reality.’
Amazon Prime Air (outdoor site pictured) was billed as a way for the company to deliver packages weighing less than five pounds within 30 minutes of a customer making an order
Aerial shots revealed a desolate site for Amazon’s drone delivery scheme after the online giant cut back its team in Britain
The managers who were appointed to oversee the project were often long-time Amazon employees who specialized in logistics and warehouse operations and had little to no knowledge of the technology involved with the project.
Sources claim this meant they couldn’t answer basic questions, adding that they had to train their replacements in Costa Rica.
In February 2020, Wired reports, the entire human and animals data analysis team, which employed dozens of people, was shuttered and reassigned, just to reopen three months later with new staff.
At around the same time, the former employees said, the company began restructuring, and managers told them that they were no longer guaranteed permanent positions – further hindering morale.
Now eight years after the first test, the plans have finally taken a step closer to reality.
Automated delivery technology already exists in the UK, with Starship Technologies sending robots out in the place of humans to deliver around the UK locations such as Cambridge, Greater Manchester, Milton Keynes, Northampton, Leeds, Bedford and Cambourne.
Starship currently delivers for Co-op and select independent restaurants and takeaways.
Bags of shopping can be received in minutes with the robots using a combination of sophisticated machine learning, artificial intelligence and sensors to travel on pavements and navigate around obstacles.
They can cross streets, climb curbs, travel at night, work in both rain and snow and carry about three shopping bags each using the same amount of energy as boiling a cup of tea.