But before it reached its intended destination-the backyard of a single-family home roughly 1,500 feet away, on Taylor Ranch Road-it turned around and started heading back. This one took off as expected, whirring loudly like an airborne lawnmower. While teams at Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle tried to diagnose the issue, the flight crew powered up a second drone.
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But when the operator in charge tried to load the flight package, the software wouldn’t boot up, says a former employee who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation: “That’s when panic started to set in, and the higher-ups went into war-room mode.” Inside the warehouse, a flight crew had loaded the drone-a six-propeller, roughly 80-pound carbon-fiber MK27-2-with a lithium-ion battery and a box containing an Exploding Kittens card game. It was supposed to be a celebration, a culmination of tens of thousands of test flights, years of dealing with Federal Aviation Administration paperwork, a decade of development, and $2 billion of investment.Įarly that morning, about 40 people-including FAA officials, Amazon engineers, public relations staff, and Prime Air chief pilot Jim Mullin-waited outside a steel frame warehouse on a flat, 20-acre parcel of land flanked by vineyards. Three days before Christmas 2022, Amazon Prime Air was set to deliver its first commercial package by drone to a residential customer in Lockeford, California.
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