'We had people come just to see it': Amazon delivers its first UK parcels by drone

Amazon has become the first retailer in the UK to start a drone delivery service with a limited launch in Darlington, County Durham.

Packages weighing less than 5lb (2.2kg) and containing everyday items such as beauty products, batteries and cables are now being delivered within a 7.5 mile (12km) radius of Amazon's fulfilment centre.

The tech giant is convinced there is demand for ultra-fast deliveries and hopes to slowly expand the service.

Rob Shield let Amazon use an Airbnb on his farm for its first test runs. "Initially it was a novelty, so we were ordering everything under the sun," he says. "Pens, paper, chocolates - anything to make it keep coming."

His orders arrived in parcels the size of shoeboxes, which were dropped from a height of 12ft (3.6m) on to the front garden.

"We'd have people come just to see it," he says.

"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."

It's taken Amazon more than a decade to get this far but the company believes it will be worth it, and says customers are ready.

"The certainty is people have never told us they want their stuff slower," says David Carbon, vice president of Amazon Prime Air.

"If you've got kids and you want fever medication, you want it. You don't want to drive to the store," he says.

In the UK, Amazon's drones currently deliver within two hours, but Carbon says the current average delivery time in the US is 36 minutes.

Amazon will carry out a maximum ten flights an hour, or up to a hundred deliveries a day on weekdays.

Darlington is an interesting case study but shows drone deliveries are not easy, says Dr Anna Jackman, an associate professor of geography at the University of Reading.

"A lot of our demand for delivery services are in urban centres. They are very densely populated, very congested. And the reality is [drone deliveries] don't work well in high-rise buildings."

She added that while there are ideas to develop rooftop deliveries and centrally-located hubs "right now we're not there yet".

In Darlington, eligible customers will need a garden or yard for a drone delivery.

Drones are already being trialled by the NHS to deliver blood supplies in London, and Royal Mail is using them to send packages to remote communities in Orkney.

Amazon is using its most modern drone, the MK30, in Darlington.

It has sensors to avoid any obstacles in its path - from trampolines and washing lines to people and other aircraft.

As the drone approaches each drop-off point, it knows exactly where to release the package using GPS.

"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," Carbon says.

"We have a targeted level of safety that's measured in aerospace terms," he adds.

Amazon already uses drones for deliveries in five US states. In early February, an MK30 drone making a delivery hit the side of an apartment building in a suburb of Dallas in Texas. The drone fell to the ground, breaking apart.

Carbon says the drone had drifted slightly having lost the GPS signal and clipped the building's gutter on the way out. No one was injured. Since then, Amazon has stopped deliveries to these types of apartments.

He says this was an example of "things that we learn as we go along" and 170,000 drone flights had gone safely.

For commercial drones to become an everyday reality, operators need to be able to fly them beyond the visual line of sight, or BVLOS.

That's what Amazon is doing in Darlington, but the drone will also be remotely tracked by an operator watching from computer screens back at base and liasing, when needed, with air traffic controllers at the nearby Teeside Airport.

Why Darlington?

Darlington is the only place outside the US where Amazon is doing drone deliveries.

It was chosen because it has a mix of residential areas, major roads and an airport all close to each other, which is useful for testing how its drones cope with a host of different conditions all within a small space - which is also close to an Amazon hub with a big choice of products.

But the service is still at an early stage. It's got approval from the Civil Aviation Authority for a trial until the end of the year. Amazon has secured temporary protected airspace, which is necessary for autonomous drone flights under current rules. Permission for this has been granted until mid June but is expected to be extended.

Darlington Borough Council told the BBC that due to the unprecedented nature of the scheme, only temporary planning permission was initially granted "to allow for testing of the drone delivery concept."

"It's great to see Darlington at the forefront of such a pioneering scheme which highlights our borough as an area of innovation, development and investment, " a council spokesperson said.

But residents may need convincing. Drone deliveries got a mixed response from some we spoke to.

The launch also took longer than Amazon had originally pledged, after saying in 2023 the service would start the following year.

The tech company has big ambitions, though.

"We wouldn't be doing it wasn't commercially viable. It's a business, right? Absolutely, it can be commercially viable, and that's the goal that we're going after, " insists Carbon.