The FAA has granted on-line retailer Amazon an exemption to operate a proprietary small drone, thereby authorizing one of its highest profile applicants to begin testing the aircraft over property the company owns in Washington state. Amazon aspires to deliver small packages by drone and recently started testing the service at a secret site in British Columbia, Canada, The Guardian reported late last month.
Amazon’s exemption to fly drones in the U.S. was made possible by a special provision of the 2012 FAA reauthorization act called Section 333, which permits the secretary of Transportation to determine if an unmanned aircraft can be safely flown in the national airspace system under conditions the FAA prescribes. The FAA letter approving Amazon’s application, dated April 8, was signed by John Duncan, flight standards service director.
The FAA is ramping up its rate of Section 333 approvals. On April 9, it announced a new “summary grant” process by which it uses common analyses to set conditions for similar categories of small drone operations—mainly for film and television production and aerial data collection. As of April 8, the agency had granted 128 petitions for exemption under Section 333. It has received more than 900 applications, according to the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
Separately, on March 19, the FAA announced that it had issued an experimental airworthiness certificate for an Amazon Logistics unmanned aircraft design, permitting the company to test the drone for research and development and crew training purposes. But within days of that announcement, Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president for global public policy, told a Senate subcommittee that the drone had become obsolete while the company awaited the certificate.
Amazon petitioned the FAA for an exemption under Section 333 last July. According to the FAA’s approval letter, which is addressed to Misener, the drone Amazon proposes to fly is a multi-rotor aircraft it described to the agency in a “confidential filing.” Other Section 333 approvals have identified the model companies plan to use.
The Amazon exemption comes with 28 operating conditions. Among them, the aircraft must be operated no more than 400 feet above ground level, within the visual line of sight of the pilot in command, during daytime, under visual meteorological conditions, and with a visual observer also present. The pilot “must hold either an airline transport, commercial, private, recreational or sport pilot certificate.” The pilot must also have a current FAA airman medical certificate “or a valid U.S. driver’s license.”
The unmanned aircraft must be identified by an N-number, with its markings presented “as large as practicable.”