Inside Amazon’s plan to deliver 500m parcels a year by drone - and within 60 minutes

Move over posties, Amazon has revealed a drone that can deliver shoebox-sized packages from dawn to dusk in less than 60 minutes.

Amazon has announced the first countries to join the global roll out of its drone program – saying the new aircraft can deliver goods bought online in less than 60 minutes from dawn to dusk.

The e-commerce titan announced at its Delivering the Future event in Seattle overnight on Wednesday that its drones are on track to deliver 500 million parcels a year by 2030.

David Carbon – the Australian-born executive in charge of Amazon’s drone program and who previously headed Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner operations – said the drones can deliver packages to people in densely populated urban areas, including apartment buildings.

The drones are designed to carry packages that are as big as a shoebox and weigh 2.3 kilograms or less.

“While the size and weight may sound small … it represents the vast percentage of what our customers want in under two hours,” Mr Carbon said.

This includes AA batteries, healthcare products and pharmaceutical medications. Amazon has been using drones to deliver parcels in two US cities – College Station in Texas and Lockeford, California.

Using such autonomous flights has been touted for use in Australia since mid last decade, when former Australia Post chief executive Ahmed Fahour launched a trial of the technology, saying they were “not gimmicks”.

Australia Post, then led by Ahmed Fahour, announced a drone program in 2016, but it failed to take off. Picture: Alex Coppel

But despite the buzz Mr Fahour’s announcement created in 2016 - which came three years after Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos first flagged drone deliveries - the aircraft has yet to take off in Australia.

And Australians will have to wait to access Amazon’s technology, with Italy and the UK announced as the first countries outside the US to receive drone deliveries by the end of next year.

“This type of innovation doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, it takes years of inventing, testing and learning to develop these breakthrough technologies,” Mr Carbon said.

Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos first announced the company was developing drone deliveries in 2013.

Mr Carbon said there was no set timeline to introduce drone deliveries – which are currently free of charge for Amazon customers – to Australia.

“We’ve designed the drone that can meet the highest regulatory standard anywhere in the world, and we‘ve designed the drone for a global market,” Mr Carbon said.

“So not to be a politician, we don’t have a specific answer when we get to Australia but our intention is to take it to all the environments where we have customers and for Australia to be one of those.”

But Mr Carbon said his elderly parents still lived in Australia, and a local drone launch would have special resonance for him personally.

“I don’t intend to be exiting this job until we do bring this around the world and Australia is definitely part of our plans.

“Australia’s got a wonderful aerospace legacy. My old man worked for Qantas for 26 years. I grew up around the corner in Tullamarine - I’d like nothing more to see this drone operating, not just in Australia but around the world.

“And we’ve certainly learned a lot going to the UK and Italy. We’ve certainly learned a lot working with those regulators.

“We’re in a better position to go and expand to where we and to go and where our customers are. It’s really all about them at the end of the day.”

Amazon launched its latest MK30 drone in November last year, replacing its MK27. The drone takes off and lands like a helicopter, while flies like a plane using wings, and is about 40 per cent quieter than its predecessor.

Amazon vice president of Prime Air, David Carbon.

“Our drones are equipped with sense and avoid technology and the MK30 can identify and avoid obstacles – even if they weren’t there the day before, such as a freshly potted plant or a crane that’s been moved into our path.

“This feat is made possible in part due to our machine learning computer vision system.”

Mr Carbon said after millions of simulations and thousands of test flights, Amazon’s drones met a “level of safety that is magnitudes higher than driving to the store”.

While the drones have the capability to deliver parcels to small yards in urban areas, Mr Carbon said they have also been delivering to apartment buildings in College Station since July.

Amazon is targeting dawn to dusk operation for its drone deliveries, but Mr Carbon stressed he didn’t want the aircrafts to be a “nuisance”, saying hours of operation will “depend on the communities and the customer”.

He also moved to allay potential privacy concerns, saying it wasn’t a data collection data.

“We don‘t use any we don’t collect data per se beyond what we need from a safety perspective. And then that’s very narrow.

“You need to keep that per the regulatory framework for flying, it’s the same as a commercial airplane.”

E-commerce giant Amazon's Mk30 drone during wind tunnel testing.

Vin Gupta – chief medical officer of Amazon’s pharmacy division – said drone deliveries had the potential to limit the spread of infectious diseases, prevent people from becoming seriously ill and prolonged hospital treatment.

“From the very first days of medical school … we’re taught about the golden window. Time to treatment matters and there is a fleeting window of time after a patient knows there’s a problem to get them treatment as rapidly as possible,” Dr Gupta said.

“To narrow that gap is critical because it can often be the difference between ending up in the hospital for prolonged hospitalisation or going home the same day.

“With drone delivery, medication can be delivered within someone’s home with zero direct contact with another human being in under an hour. That’s not just unprecedented speed and convenience, that’s limiting the spread, especially as we’re dealing with this new era of infectious diseases.”

The author travelled to Seattle as a guest of Amazon.