Amazon has sent its first UK packages by drone.
The MK30 – the company’s latest model – has begun delivering packages in under two hours in Darlington, County Durham.
The launch is currently limited to deliveries within a radius of 7.5 miles (12km) around Amazon’s fulfilment centre and packages weighing less than 5lbs (2.2kg).
But the e-commerce giant hopes the new tech will enable super-fast deliveries and that the service will soon be expanded to other parts of the country.
Rob Shield was at the forefront of the roll-out, allowing Amazon to use an Airbnb on his farm for initial test runs.
‘Initially it was a novelty, so we were ordering everything under the sun,’ he said. ‘Pens, paper, chocolates – anything to make it keep coming.’
Shield said people would come to the farm ‘just to see’ the drone drop off the orders, which came in packaging the size of a shoebox and were dropped into his front garden from 12ft in the air.
‘Since then, you obviously start realising, ‘I actually need something today’, like tape measures and stuff like that you’re always losing – we just order it and it comes,’ he added.
Amazon has been planning to launch drone deliveries for more than a decade. It ran a trial of an early drone model in Cambridge in 2016 and successfully made a delivery in just 13 minutes.
The drones are already in use in five US states, making deliveries in an average of 36 minutes.
For now, the company will carry out a maximum of 10 flights per hour, or up to a hundred deliveries a day on weekdays.
The MK30’s advanced technology means it is able to dodge obstacles in its path, including trees, washing lines and people, and even other flying objects.
It then uses GPS to drop the package at the correct address.
But the model is not without its flaws. In February of this year, one of the drones hit the side of an apartment building in Dallas, Texas, while making a delivery.
David Carbon, vice president of Amazon Prime Air, said this was an example of ‘things that we learn as we go along.’
‘This is effectively an autonomous drone that can do what a pilot does in a flight deck. It can do what ground crews do, and it can deliver a package,’ he said.