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College Station Mayor Asks FAA to Put Brakes on Amazon Prime Air Expansion

Miriam McNabb
medicine by drone, Amazon

Mayor John Nichols Calls for Delay on Increased Drone Deliveries Due to Noise Concerns and Zoning Issues

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

The mayor of College Station, Texas is urging the FAA to slow down an effort by Amazon Prime Air to expand its drone delivery operations in the city.

Mayor John Nichols wrote a letter to the agency to comment on a draft environmental impact statement, which the company had submitted to the FAA requesting an amendment to its Operation Specifications to allow Amazon to introduce its new MK30 drone and expand commercial drone package delivery operations from its Center in College Station.

The MK30, which the company unveiled last November, is smaller and lighter than Amazon’s current MK27.2 model, and is capable of flying in inclement weather, enabling it to expand the number of hours it can be flown per day. It is also designed to be 40% quieter then the MK27.2.

Currently, Prime Air operates up to 200 MK27-2 delivery flights per operating day and flies up to 260 operating days per year, for a total of roughly 52,000 annual delivery operations.

This gives the UAV a circle-shaped operating area with a radius of approximately 3.7 miles. The introduction of the MK30 drones would more than double the company’s operating range to 7.5 miles, increasing the company’s total operating area from 43.7 square miles to 174 square miles. Under Prime Air’s proposal, average daily operations would increase from an estimated 200 flights per day to 469 daily flights and the number of annual operations would more than triple to 171,329.

Mayor’s Letter to FAA

In his letter to the FAA, Nichols praised Prime Air for its cooperation with the city up to this point but worried about the effect the expansion of service would have on surrounding residential areas.

“While the City is supportive of Amazon Prime Air’s efforts, we do not support their request in its entirety,” he wrote. “Residents in neighborhoods adjacent to Amazon Prime Air’s facility have expressed concern to the City Council regarding drone noise levels, particularly during take-off and landing, as well as in some delivery operations. With the potential to increase the frequency of drone deliveries to the amount stated in Amazon Prime Air’s request, residents have continued to voice their concerns to City Council that the noise levels will only get worse and will impact the enjoyment of their property.”

He asked the FAA to delay approving the increase in the number of deliveries and the expanded operational days and hours “until additional noise mitigation efforts are implemented by Amazon Prime Air.”

Additionally, Nichols said the increased operations could violate the city’s current zoning regulations for the Amazon property, which call for limited commercial usage.

He said however, that the city supports the introduction of the quieter MK30 drone, “which should have a positive effect on the current noise levels.”

Location, Location, Location

In an interview with DroneLife, Nichols expressed concern that the proposed service expansion would transform Amazon’s operations from a pilot program into a full-scale commercial operation, and suggested that the company might have to relocate to another part of the city if that were the case.

The current site, a former research and development property, is located close to residential area. “That turns out to be not more than six or seven hundred feet from some residential backyards,” he said. “And I don’t think it’s suitable for a large-scale commercial operation over the long run.”

Nichols said he hopes to be able to continue to work with Amazon Prime Air as it seeks to expand its operations in College Station.

“We’re a university town. Technology is generally thought to be a good thing to be evaluating and testing,” he said. “Broadly speaking, I’d say the citizens are still supportive, but I think everybody wants to see the operation improved, particularly on the noise mitigation.”

Amazon Struggles to Achieve Full Commercialization

For more than a decade, Amazon has struggled to get its plans for establishing commercial drone delivery service off the ground. In was back in 2013 when Amazon founder and then-CEO Jeff Bezos first announced on 60 minutes that the company would soon be able to offer deliveries to people’s homes in 30 minutes or less.

Over the next 10 years, Amazon underwent many starts and stops as it struggled to overcome technical and regulatory issues. Finally, in 2020 the company received a Part 135 Air Carrier Certificate from the FAA that allowed it to operate as an airline and deliver small packages via drone. Soon after Amazon announced its first two pilot operations, in College Station and Lockeford, California.

However, in April of this year, after disappointing customer response, the company said it was closing the Lockeford site, while also announcing plans to launch another pilot program in the West Valley of the Phoenix Metro Area in Arizona later in 2024.

Beyond Visual Line of Sight

In May, the company announced that it had received new FAA permissions to conduct Beyond Visual Line of Sight missions around the College Station area. In a press release, Amazon touted its detect- and-avoid technology, which led to the approval. “We’ve spent years developing, testing, and refining our onboard detect-and-avoid system,” it bragged.

Amazon said the BVLOS approval would pave the way for the company to expand its operations in College Station and other future locations. Meanwhile, Amazon Prime Air hopes to improve its fortunes with the introduction of its MK30 aircraft.

In addition to being lighter, quieter and having twice the range of its predecessor, the MK30’s six-rotor form and improved safety-critical features, will allow the drone to deliver packages to customers with smaller backyards and in more densely populated suburban areas, the company said.

Nichols cheered the plans to introduce the new drone, which should help alleviate the city’s noise concerns, but said its use would not change the city’s opposition to the rest of Amazon’s expansion plans in College Station.

“We endorsed that effort, but we indicated in the letter that we did not endorse the idea of turning this drone port into a fully commercial operation,” he said.

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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.

 

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