Amazon opens Prime Air drone lab for tour

A group of schoolchildren and a local newspaper, the Cambridge News, were given an exclusive tour of Amazon's Prime Air drone delivery laboratory in Cambridge, UK last week. The drone lab is one of several throughout the UK working on commercial drones that will be capable of delivering packages weighing up to 2kg in 30 minutes or less to Amazon customers within a 15-mile radius.

Amazon has Prime Air development centres in the United States, the UK, Austria and Israel as well as testing drones "in multiple international locations" but this is very much a future service. While this delivery drone technology is well into development, the company cites airspace regulations as a challenge: "Putting Prime Air into service will take some time, but we will deploy when we have the regulatory support needed to realise our vision."

The reality is that the Federal Aviation Administration – the body in the US that regulates airspace – says that commercial drones are illegal but it hasn't actually come up with any official drone regulations, and legally it's not clear whether a drone is actually an aircraft so the situation is complicated.

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