Amazon Levels Up Drones And Jets In The UK

For the most part, the newest and most cutting-edge gadgets that Amazon develops to help make deliveries faster and more efficient receive their first testing stages in the company’s home country. However, evidence is pointing to an international debut across the pond for many of Amazon’s rumored projects.

In interviews with Forbes, several experts, including David Jinks, head of customer research at London’s ParcelHero, explained how developments in the U.K. retail landscape have helped accelerate drone development on the British Isles.

“Amazon is leading the investment in delivery in 2016,” Jinks told Forbes. “And this year will see a transformation in the way we send and receive parcels and deliveries. [Amazon] argues aviation regulations are now holding back [drones’] introduction just as much, if not more, than technology issues. And the U.K. Government has been far quicker than the U.S. authorities to support Amazon’s drones trials.”

Even U.K. government officials, like U.K. Transport Minister and Member of Parliament Robert Goodwill, have confirmed that Amazon executives have approached them with the expressed purpose of sidestepping the U.S. as a means of getting its drone program — literally and metaphorically — off the ground.

“Amazon came to see me to ask about starting drone trials in the U.K. because regulations in the U.S. were too restrictive,” Goodwill said, as quoted by Forbes. “So much for the land of the free.”

That’s not all Amazon has kept its U.K. staff busy with. Forbes also noted that Amazon has been busy with slightly larger flying machines, leasing a Boeing 737 to fly a route five times per week between stops in the U.K., Poland and Germany.

“Amazon is reportedly planning to lease as many as twenty 767s in the U.S., so introducing U.K.-EU flights makes sense,” Jinks noted. “It often uses the U.K. to develop its services before introducing them in the U.S.”