TEST DRIVING A DRONE
Amazon experiments at B. C. site
Spurned by U. S. regulators, Amazon. com has turned to the one country where flying delivery robots are still welcome: Canada.
The online retail giant is testing its latest prototypes for package-carrying drones at a top secret site in British Columbia, the U. K.’ s Guardian newspaper revealed on Monday.
“We are rapidly experimenting and iterating on Amazon Prime Air ... including outdoors at a rural test site in Canada,” wrote Amazon spokeswoman Kristen Kish in an email to the National Post.
First announced in 2013, Prime Air is a proposed arm of Amazon. com that would use autonomous drones travelling as fast as 80 km/ h to rush packages to urban locations around the world.
Located a mere 600 metres from the U. S. border, the Canadian testing grounds fulfil a lingering threat by Amazon to take its drone research abroad unless U. S. regulators speed up their glacial approval process for unmanned aircraft.
Earlier this month, the Federal Aviation Administration cleared one of Amazon’s drones for testing, only to be informed that the six- month approval process had taken so long that the vehicle was already obsolete.
Guarded by a small contingent of plain- clothes security guards, the Canadian testing site is being used to test autonomous drones capable of carrying a five- pound package as far as 14 kilometres.
The technology will one day be used “to deliver packages to customers in 30 minutes or less,” said Kish.
Although Transport Canada requires that the test drones remain less than 90 metres from the ground and within sight of their operators, Canada’s open- armed policy for flying robots enabled the Amazon team to win approval for the tests in a matter of weeks.
“In Vancouver, it can take only three weeks to get approval,” said Ophir Kendler with Aerial X, a Vancouver- based drone contractor.
South of the border, meanwhile, it will be another two years until comprehensive U. S. drone legislation takes effect.
While Amazon’s drones have also been allowed to take to the air in the U. K. and Israel, on U. S. soil they remain restricted to indoor testing at a Seattle- area facility.
Amazon’s secret Canadian drone trials are only the latest evidence of a strict regulatory regime that is inadvertently putting Canada “well ahead of the U. S. with regards to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” said Andrew Chapman with Vancouver’s Sky-mount Unmanned Systems, writing in an email to the National Post.