Amazon Halts Drone Deliveries in Texas and Arizona: Temporary Pause

Amazon suspends drone delivery in Texas, Arizona

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

Amazon recently announced it was suspending its drone delivery services at its facilities in College Station, Texas and Tolleson, Arizona until further notice.

The company, which in 2020 received its FAA Part 135 Air Carrier Certificate — authorizing it as an airline able to deliver small packages via drone — shut down its delivery service on January 17 in order to implement software changes.

“Safety underscores everything we do in Prime Air and our MK30 drone is safe and compliant. It’s designed to safely respond to unknown events in a known way, and the overall architecture of the drone has performed as expected,”Amazon spokesperson Sam Stephenson said in a statement.

The pause in operations comes after a safety incident occurred in December at an Amazon testing facility in Pendleton, Oregon, although Amazon said the incident was not directly related to its suspension decision. According to published reports, two drones undergoing tests crashed as a result of a software malfunction caused by light rain. One of the drones reportedly caught fire upon impact.

Stephenson said the Pendleton incident was “not the primary reason for our voluntary operational pause.” He added that Prime Air continued to make deliveries to its customers safely and within federal compliance until the company voluntarily paused the service.

“These incidents occurred at our private and closed testing facility, where the purpose of these tests is to push our aircraft past their limits – it would be irresponsible not to do that,” Stephenson said. “We expect incidents like these to occur in those tests, and they help us continue to improve the safety of our operations.”

He added that Prime Air’s commercial MK30 drone operations “have been conducted safely and in compliance with all FAA regulations and requirements.”

Amazon Prime Air’s drone delivery business has gone through a series of ups and downs since it first began to test out its commercial drone delivery business model in College Station and Lockeford, California in December 2022.

The next month Amazon announced the largest headcount reduction in its history, slashing 18,000 jobs to improve its financial results. Although Prime Air was among the Amazon business segments hit by the layoffs, the company said the job cuts would not result in the shutdown of its drone delivery test programs in College Station and Lockeford.

Amazon announced the expansion of its drone delivery service in College Station to include the delivery of prescription drugs in October 2023.

The following April, citing strategic business reasons, Amazon Prime said it was shutting down its pilot delivery project in Lockeford. The same month, the company announced a planned expansion into Tolleson, Arizona, part of the Phoenix Metro area, as part of its broader effort to roll out its commercial drone delivery business across the country.

Then in May, 2024, “everything store” Amazon announced that it had received FAA approval to conduct Beyond Visual Line Of Sight (BVLOS) missions around the College Station area.

Last July, citing noise complaints from residents, College Station Mayor John Nichols, in a letter to the FAA, urged the agency to slow down an Amazon Prime Air’s effort to expand its drone delivery operations in the city. The letter was sent as a comment on an Amazon draft environmental impact statement (EIS) requesting FAA’s permission to introduce its new MK30 drone and expand commercial drone package delivery operations from its center in the city.

In its draft EIS, Amazon said the MK30 is smaller and lighter therefore 40% quieter then the MK27.2 model that Amazon was then flying. The MK30 was also designed to be capable of flying in inclement weather, enabling it to expand the number of hours it could be flown per day, the company said.

Amazon Prime Air completed the expansion of its drone delivery services into Tolleson in November 2024 The Tolleson program was said to mark a new strategic direction after the company had ended its delivery initiative in Lockeford.

The company gave assurances that its latest setback was only temporary and said that employees at both its Tolleson and College Station facilities would remain on the job and be paid through the pause in service.

“Our services will resume once these updates are completed and approved by the FAA,” Stephenson 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.