A package dropping from the sky may soon arrive in far more neighborhoods.
Jeff Bezos first floated the idea of drone delivery nearly 13 years ago. Back in 2013, he promised to build a fleet of drones that could carry small packages within 30 minutes. He left the CEO role five years ago, but the vision never died.
The road since then has been bumpy. Prime Air has dealt with regulatory delays, layoffs, technical problems, and pushback from communities in its early test zones. After winning permission for long-range flights in 2024, Amazon grew from its initial Dallas and Phoenix areas to 11 metro regions. Six more locations are scheduled to come online.
Most Prime Air orders arrive in about 60 minutes, though some show up just after checkout. That speed is the whole point, according to David Carbon, the vice president in charge of Prime Air.
"Customers continue to demand faster delivery times," Carbon said. "Bottom line is we have yet to reach diminishing returns when it comes to how fast we deliver to our customers."
CNBC obtained a recording of the March employee meeting, and the 1 million deliveries prediction now looks within reach.
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Carbon described Prime Air as the highest demand drone delivery service in the industry.
The company is not alone in the sky. Alphabet's Wing passed the 1 million commercial delivery mark earlier this year and operates in 20 U.S. markets with partners like Walmart and DoorDash. Startup Zipline works on four continents and has completed 2 million deliveries.
Amazon's drones can carry up to 5 pounds and fly within 7.5 miles of a facility. Moving some work into robotic sort centers has expanded the list of products eligible for drone delivery. Carbon said Prime Air is also testing a tether-based gentle delivery option for fragile goods like eggs. Current flights release packages from 13 feet up, which is not ideal for a carton of eggs.
The expansion comes with questions about safety. At the March employee meeting, Carbon discussed an October crash in Tolleson, Arizona, where two of Amazon's drones hit a crane. The National Transportation Safety Board still lists its investigation as active, and the FAA is also probing the incident.
"At the time, we were detecting these cranes above the industry standard," Carbon said. "We trained our algorithms, we felt pretty good, but we found in the real world the performance just wasn't good enough and let me tell you, that was a humbling experience."
The FAA is separately examining a November event in Waco, Texas, where a drone cut an internet cable while climbing from a customer's yard. And in the UK, the Air Accidents Investigation Branch started a review just recently after a Prime Air drone landed in a garden in Darlington, England. Amazon told the BBC it believes the drone overall hit an object extending above a moving vehicle's roof. The company said the aircraft operated as designed and landed safely, with no reports of injuries.
Some people in the metro areas Amazon serves still voice concerns about drone noise, privacy, and quiet neighborhoods. Those worries are not going away as the service expands.
Delivery times keep shrinking. Amazon has moved from free two-day shipping to one-day and same-day delivery, and it is testing even faster options in more areas. Drones are the next step in that path, and the company is betting faster is always better.
For shoppers, the convenience of a package arriving in less than an hour will soon be available in far more places. The trade-off is a future with more drones buzzing overhead, and the safety questions that come with them are not yet worked out in real time.
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