Amazon/YouTube
- Amazon launched its Prime Air drone delivery program ten years ago.
- A string of crashes at one test site has led some employees to raise safety concerns.
- Prime Air's safety teams have been hit hard by Amazon's far-reaching layoffs, employees said.
When Amazon announced last summer that the towns of College Station, Texas, and Lockeford, California, would be its first test sites for package delivery by automated drone, some residents expressed concerns.
The possibility of Amazon's nearly-90-pound drone "falling from the sky onto our home, onto our car, onto our children" was nerve-wracking, College Station resident Amina Alikhan said at a public meeting last summer.
Amazon did its best to assuage those anxieties. "Safety is of the utmost importance" to Amazon, a company representative said at that Texas meeting. In Lockeford, Amazon hosted a "Welcome Picnic," inviting residents to "learn more about how our drones can safely navigate through the sky and conveniently deliver packages right to your backyard," according to a picnic invitation seen by Insider.
Now, barely a month after starting deliveries to real customers in those towns, Amazon's drone safety teams in Lockeford and College Station have been decimated by the company's far-reaching layoffs, four current and former employees told Insider.
Cuts have also deeply affected the safety team in Amazon's Pendleton, Oregon, test site, which has seen a string of crashes, including one in 2021 that sparked a 25-acre brush fire, the employees said.
Amazon is in the midst of its largest-ever layoffs. More than 18,000 people have been let go in rolling cuts since last autumn. CEO Andy Jassy has justified the layoffs as positioning the company to better face "the uncertain economy."
The drone safety team cuts, combined with stepped-up pressure to meet delivery targets, have generated new concerns about the potential dangers the program poses and thrown into question Amazon's stated commitment to safety, the employees said.
"I think it says what their priorities are," said one current employee. If Amazon prioritized safety "as much as they like to tell the media, that team wouldn't have gotten laid off." (Employees interviewed for this article asked not to be named in order to discuss internal matters. Insider has confirmed their identities.)
In an email, Amazon spokesperson Maria Boschetti said that "many of the allegations in this story are misinformed or inaccurate."
"Safety is our top priority," she wrote. "Implying that we no longer have a robust safety team in place is completely inaccurate." Amazon has "a dedicated safety officer in each location, plus dozens of other employees who are responsible for safety as part of their job," she wrote.
JORDAN STEAD/ Amazon
Employees say Amazon has recently deputized some people to serve as safety officers in addition to their other responsibilities, but argue that's not the same as having a dedicated safety team acting as an intermediary between flight operators and management.
Now, "there's very few people on site I trust to push back on pressure and do the right thing if there's a safety or regulatory concern," another employee said.
The layoffs mean fewer people than before are watching to make sure every flight is safe, employees contend. That could make it harder to tell if the drone could be inadvertently flying over people – which it's not certified to do.
"We can't properly clear the airspace," one employee said. "We can't really confirm that we aren't flying over people."
Boschetti said the company is complying with federal aviation safety requirements and safely serving customers. Employees who believe otherwise are "misinformed and incorrect," she wrote.
Bezos presented Prime Air as the future of Amazon
When Amazon launched its drone program, called Prime Air, in 2013, then-CEO Jeff Bezos presented a vision of a fleet of drones able to fly packages to customers within just 30 minutes and said he anticipated the drones would be delivering packages within five years.
That deadline came and went. A year ago, executives concluded the seven years Prime Air had spent on R&D had failed to produce "a delivery service that could be safely operated over populated areas," Insider previously reported.
Prime Air has previously faced criticism from employees who say the pressure from executives to meet ambitious goals for drone delivery has at times superseded safety considerations.
Employees in Prime Air's UK division told Wired in 2021 that safety sometimes seemed to be an afterthought. That division, which was responsible for reviewing footage for potential threats to train the automated drone's hazard-detection system, could be dysfunctional, workers said. One employee recalled seeing another hold down the "approve" button on their computer to mark footage as all-clear, regardless of whether there were hazards in it.
Boschetti said the software powering Amazon's automated drones is "industry-leading technology that ensures they can safely navigate to their destinations and back while detecting and avoiding obstacles – even unexpected ones – and safeguarding people, pets, and property."
The Pendleton test site's history of crashes has also prompted safety concerns from some employees.
One crash in 2021 sparked a 25-acre brush fire after the drone plunged to the earth "in uncontrolled free fall," according to a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) crash report. An "intense lithium battery fire quickly consumed the aircraft," and the fire spread to the field where the drone had crash-landed, the report added.
Six months ago, a drone plummeted 180 feet out of the sky and "just blew apart when it hit the ground," said a person with knowledge of the crash. In Amazon's required reporting to the FAA, that crash was described as a "hard landing."
Amazon reported another "hard landing" drone crash at Pendleton in October, according to an FAA report obtained by Insider. Boschetti did not immediately respond to questions about the cause of that crash.
Last month, a Prime Air manager at the Pendleton test site sued Amazon for retaliation after he said he was fired for reporting safety concerns, The Seattle Times reported.
Amazon has previously stated the manager's allegations are false. The company has also said that some drones are expected to crash during testing, where they are being pushed to their limits, and that no one has been harmed during drone tests.
Prime Air is also still having challenges sticking to a schedule, employees said.
In Lockeford, only two customers had been onboarded to participate in the pilot as of mid-January, according to two employees. The College Station site is "servicing just a handful of customers," local news station KBTX-3 reported last week. Amazon had planned to deliver packages to 1,300 customers in those towns, Insider previously reported.
Senior leaders are pushing hard to get more customers onboarded, even with the new reductions in staff, those two employees said.
Upper management "continually demands huge goals that we barely manage to do and then asks for more," another employee said. Even before the layoffs, Prime Air was struggling, this employee added.
"In my opinion the layoffs just killed the program."
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