Next time, half an hour after Amazon.Com Inc orders a bottle of face cream or a bag of potato chips, it may be a drone that drops the goods at your door.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said on Monday that it had issued Part 135standard certification to Amazon.Com Inc's Prime Air UAV fleet, Bloomberg reported. With the certification, Amazon.Com Inc drones will have the right to operate any number of drones wherever they choose. The drones approved for commercial delivery experiments will be the hexagonal next-generation hybrid drones demonstrated last year.

Amazon.Com Inc has not disclosed when and where to start commercial delivery trials, but Bloomberg said the company already has test sites in the northwest and nearby Vancouver. Amazon.Com Inc also tested drones in the UK in 2016.

Obtaining the FAA certificate is an "important step", said Amazon.Com Inc, and a milestone to help the company achieve this goal: to reduce the delivery time to 30 minutes or less.

This certification "shows that FAA is full of confidence in the operation and safety procedures of the automatic drone delivery service that Amazon.Com Inc will one day deliver worldwide. David Carbon, vice president of Prime Air, said in a statement.

However, this does not mean that Amazon.Com Inc can immediately provide consumer-grade drone delivery services for everyone. Amazon.Com Inc said they will continue to test the technology that has been developed for many years.

According to Reuters statistics, of the more than 5000 patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office to Amazon.Com Inc between December 2016 and May 2019, at least 210 are related to drones and self-driving topics, comparable to giants such as Google, Apple Inc and Uber.

Just two months ago, Amazon.Com Inc just bought the Zoox passenger car project for 1.3 billion yuan. Although Musk mocked it as "Copycat", Bezos indirectly got a self-driving taxi license, and there are relatively mature vehicles that can be integrated into the logistics and distribution system.

Drones: spend money to save money

As early as 2013, Bezos predicted in an interview that drones would become common within five years. For years, Amazon.Com Inc has also been openly discussing his ambitions for drone delivery and has invested heavily in the project. Currently, the company has established teams of nearly 1000 employees in five countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Austria and Israel.

The cost and speed of logistics have been restricting the development of American e-commerce. Small-size goods such as USB cables, mobile phone stickers and other goods weighing no more than 4.5jin (5 pounds) account for 85% of Amazon.Com Inc's online sales, with a maximum delivery range of 24 kilometers. If only relying on ground transportation, the logistics cost will even be higher than the product price.

A research report by Deutsche Bank, an investment bank, listed differences in transportation costs for shoebox-sized packages of "last mile" in different logistics schemes:

• United Parcel Service Inc UPS Express or FedEx Corp FedEx:6 from US $6.50

• Intermediate delivery services such as OnTrac:4$ to $5

• Last mile of postal express: about $2

• Robots / drones: less than $0.05 per mile

Obviously, Amazon.Com Inc drone delivery will greatly reduce logistics costs. In the past, manpower is no longer needed to occupy the main cost of logistics, mainly the cost of machine depreciation and electricity. And drones have less loss than vehicles, and a distribution of electricity (mainly batteries) won't cost much.

In addition, drone delivery can be faster. Flying can walk a straight distance, avoid traffic jams, traffic lights and other traffic conditions, because all based on machines, UAV can also accept intelligent scheduling system scheduling, fast delivery.

The Deutsche Bank report assessed that Amazon.Com Inc's drone delivery could reduce the "last mile" delivery time to 30 minutes.

There is a long way to go in two or seven years.

In 2013, Amazon.Com Inc began testing delivery drones, with the goal of delivering packages to customers' doorsteps in 30 minutes or less. However, in view of the logistics and regulatory problems in the United States at that time, many media thought that Bezos was just a publicity show in order to save millions of advertising money.

In 2014, Amazon.Com Inc's delivery drone prototype Prime Air was unveiled, which can be delivered within the range of 20km. CEO Bezos said publicly that Amazon.Com Inc is designing eighth-generation delivery drones, which will use drones to deliver fresh food to AmazonFresh.

In December 2015, Amazon.Com Inc released the latest design of Prime Air, the first time the company has demonstrated how drones work. Prime Air's design, which combines helicopters and aircraft, has a range of 15 miles, has a top speed of 90 kilometers per hour and can deliver goods in half an hour.

In addition, the Prime Air can take off and land vertically, rise into the air and then switch to a general horizontal flight mode. To avoid obstacles on the ground and in the air, Prime Air is equipped with "sense and avoidance" (sense and avoid) technology. And drones can also automatically detect landing sites as they approach their destination.

At the time, the industry thought the delivery method was subversive, but in 2015, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) still banned drone delivery, and drones could only fly within the operating field of vision, and drones were prohibited from flying at an altitude of more than 10 miles.

The obstacles of US regulators have not hindered Amazon.Com Inc's pace. In July 2016, the British Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) lifted strict restrictions on the flight of drones, allowing Amazon.Com Inc to start testing his drones, including the performance of sensors, to ensure that drones can identify and avoid obstacles.

Amazon.Com Inc completed the first flight of commercial drone delivery in December 2016. Specifically, a customer was given a bag of sweet and salty popcorn and a Fire TV TV box in Cambridge, England.

The maximum load of UAV delivery is 2.3 kg and can fly below 122 meters. From the completion of the order to the delivery of the goods takes a total of 13 minutes, the whole process does not need human control, with the help of GPS to complete the positioning, the UAV will automatically return after delivery.

Amazon.Com Inc completed his first drone package delivery somewhere in the United States in March 2017, with seven cans of sunscreen and a total weight of about 1.81Kg, marking another big step forward for Amazon.Com Inc's air delivery in the United States.

Amazon.Com Inc launched a new electric delivery drone for the first time at MARS in 2019, which can deliver packages weighing less than 5 pounds to customers in 30 minutes and can fly 15 miles continuously.

In the air, the new Prime Air propellers have an S-shaped curve, making them stable in high winds and easily grounded, reducing the likelihood of damage.

On the ground, the new version of the UAV is equipped with sensors (including stereo RGB cameras and thermal imaging cameras) that can provide data to complex machine learning algorithms, automatically detect whether they are too close to customers and avoid obstacles (such as pets, paragliders, wires).

Amazon.Com Inc said the electric drones can be recharged in a sustainable way and are more energy efficient than transporting parcels by car.

According to Amazon.Com Inc's global consumer business, CEO Jeff Wilke, only if the service is secure enough will users accept it without concern. Amazon.Com Inc's drones are "as stable as commercial aircraft". It can move in three-dimensional space, and the sound is so low that users won't even feel it coming.

In August 2019, Amazon.Com Inc submitted a petition asking the FAA to approve the plans. Amazon.Com Inc said in the petition that the early delivery will be concentrated in areas with low population density, and the package will weigh 5 pounds or less.

Third, the anxiety of the third place

However, Amazon.Com Inc is not the only company approved by FAA.

In April last year, Alphabet's Wing became the first drone delivery company approved by FAA for commercial delivery in the United States. UPS received similar approval from FAA last October. With this certification, UPS has the right to operate any number of drones wherever it chooses.

Today, in Virginia, Wing provides over-the-counter drugs, snacks and gifts to local retailers on behalf of FedEx Corp. UPS is supplying prescription drugs to CVS in North Carolina. However, neither company has widely implemented drone delivery.

When Amazon.Com Inc announced that the Prime Air drone delivery program would be launched "within a few months" last June, some people inside the company laughed and thought the statement was premature and ridiculous, according to foreign media BI.

The newly designed drone needs more testing, the service is not fully integrated with Amazon.Com Inc warehouse, and regulatory hurdles remain.

In fact, drone teams have been trying to resolve internal conflicts, lack of focus and regulation for years. These factors are also the main reasons for Amazon.Com Inc's "ranking third".

Some employees say Amazon.Com Inc might have moved faster had it not been for other deep-rooted problems within Prime Air.

Among them, the tension between Amazon.Com Inc's local talent and newly hired employees with aviation background has always been the root cause of the conflict.

For example, engineer Amazon.Com Inc likes to iterate and change quickly in the process of discovering system vulnerabilities. But in the field of traditional aviation, this is not the case. In traditional aviation, you have to follow a more structured and regulated process before making any changes. This discrepancy led to delays in the approval process for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

However, the most important thing is that Amazon.Com Inc's traditional way of thinking of solving difficult problems first often conflicts with the simple and stable way of aviation. Amazon.Com Inc's drone design is often the focus of debate:

People in the aviation industry prefer more traditional designs used by other companies because more data and reference points can be used in the FAA certification process. However, Amazon.Com Inc's leader wants unconventional design because it has advanced features, such as energy saving and better control, although it means more development time.

In addition, the Prime Air team has always maintained a start-up-like environment, keeping a cultural distance from Amazon.Com Inc's headquarters. However, this team secret culture also makes it inefficient to collect real-world data by running flight tests from the outside, thus delaying the entire development process.

In March, David Carbon, a former Boeing Co executive, was appointed to take over the drone team. The latter moved quickly to transform Prime Air from an isolated research laboratory into a more commercial organization, working closely with Amazon.Com Inc's retail organization.

The move to appoint the executive, who has extensive experience in aircraft manufacturing and assembly, was driven by Dave Clark, Amazon.Com Inc's director of operations. At the end of last year, Clark became in charge of Prime Air supervision. Clark, who is known for his tough leadership, put more pressure on the Prime Air team to produce results immediately.

Now, the team has withdrawn from some long-term projects, such as making special materials that can reduce the weight of drones and focusing on getting the service up and running as soon as possible. In recent months, top aviation engineers have been required to attend a two-day software certification training course run by Patmos Engineering Services, a consulting firm that helps companies complete the FAA certification process.

Meanwhile, Amazon.Com Inc has begun building some drones in his Sumner warehouse, 30 miles south of Seattle.

Fourth, patience that is disappearing

However, the single biggest obstacle to Amazon.Com Inc's Prime Air launch is still regulation.

In the United States, every commercial drone delivery service needs to be approved by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). This approval is accompanied by a series of different restrictions, but the two most important requirements are "vision":

The operator can (but not must) cooperate with the observer to maintain regular eye contact with the aircraft and not to fly over the crowd.

For a company like Amazon.Com Inc, which delivers billions of packages a year, it is almost impossible to launch a drone service that meets these requirements. At present, no company in the world has been approved to make regular deliveries out of sight and fly independently across the country.

Amazon.Com Inc continues to work closely with the FAA, and Amazon.Com Inc's latest drones fly in public areas designated by the FAA every day to generate the required data, according to people familiar with the matter.

After all the trials and tribulations, Bezos is still one of the biggest supporters of Prime Air. But his patience may be fading.

At last year's plenary meeting, an employee asked Bezos when he expected to see Amazon.Com Inc's package delivered by drones, according to minutes of a meeting obtained by Business Insider.

To find out, Bezos turned to Jeff Jeff Wilke and said with a long, forceful laugh, "by the way, I may have asked this question." "

The latter said he had nothing to share, adding that he was "optimistic" because the team was "working to address regulatory and technical constraints at the same time".

Bezos followed, frowning as Wilke began to walk off the stage. "so. Is it Tuesday? "