Daniel Silva remembers being an intern at Amazon in the summer of 2014, months after founder Jeff Bezos unveiled the company’s plans for drone delivery service via Amazon Prime Air.
“At the time, it seemed like we were going to start seeing drones delivering packages within a year,” said Silva, now an industrial and systems engineering professor at Auburn University.
Yet progress has been slow, even for a company of Amazon’s stature. In 2016, Prime Air made its first successful drone delivery, which took place in the U.K. Last year, it received Federal Aviation Administration clearance for drone delivery on a rural test range. Parcel-carrying drones haven’t filled the skies just yet.
