![]() Next door, retiree Dan Zamarripa, another one of Prime Air’s first customers, says he’s used the service to buy batteries, moisturizing cream, and a toilet handle. Deliveries are available Thursday to Monday, but not when there’s rain or strong wind, which have been constants in Lockeford this year. Each time, a small fleet of Prime Air pickups with visual observers had showed up at his house to keep an eye on the drones. And after the December card-game drop, he used the service once more to buy a refrigerator filter, which arrived in under an hour, as promised. The man’s actual first deliveries-an Amazon Fire TV stick and pack of gum received earlier that fall-were unofficial, as Prime Air hadn’t gained FAA approval to fly drones commercially. Once approved, he was sent an email with a link to a private Amazon landing page displaying items available for drone delivery: “Toothpaste, lots of condoms, things like that,” he says. He signed a waiver requiring he and his family stay out of the backyard during scheduled delivery times. The rep surveyed the property-a 5-acre parcel with a swimming pool, trampoline, and chicken coop-to confirm the yard had the necessary air clearance (no overhanging tree limbs or power lines) and 10-foot clearance radius in which to install a metal stake, a plastic sheet emblazoned with an Amazon logo, and a landing pad with a QR-code-like fiducial marker that the drone would fly toward before lowering to make a drop. Later that month, an Amazon representative paid a visit to his house on Taylor Ranch Road, a dead-end street that’s home to five houses. He figured maybe drone delivery was the future: “And I’ll tell my kids, ‘You got the first Amazon drone delivery ever.’ Kind of cool bragging rights for them.” He asked for anonymity for security reasons because of his job in criminal justice. The first official customer for drone delivery in Lockeford signed up for the service after Amazon promoted it at his children’s school science fair in September 2022. (The other live commercial delivery site, in College Station, Texas, was picked for similar reasons, plus its proximity to Texas A&M, a university with a robust aerospace program.) It was chosen as one of Amazon’s first two customer-delivery sites because it’s flat, near an airport, and usually dry, according to a former employee involved in the selection process. Lockeford, a town of around 3,500 residents about 40 miles south of Sacramento, is built around light industrial shops, cherry orchards, nut farms, and strawberry fields. The drone’s sensors had identified that the 2.5-foot-wide QR-code-like marker it was aiming for in the customer’s yard wasn’t where it was supposed to be. 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. 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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