Three days before Christmas 2022, Amazon Prime Air was set to deliver its first commercial package by drone to a residential customer in Lockeford, California. It was supposed to be a celebration, a culmination of tens of thousands of test flights, years of dealing with Federal Aviation Administration paperwork, a decade of development, and $2 billion of investment. Early that morning, about 40 people--including FAA officials, Amazon engineers, public relations staff, and Prime Air chief pilot Jim Mullin--waited outside a steel frame warehouse on a flat, 20-acre parcel of land flanked by vineyards. Inside the warehouse, a flight crew had loaded the drone--a six-propeller, roughly 80-pound carbon-fiber MK27-2--with a lithium-ion battery and a box containing an Exploding Kittens card game. But when the operator in charge tried to load the flight package, the software wouldn't boot up, says a former employee who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation: "That's when panic started to set in, and the higher-ups went into war-room mode."

Amazon has unveiled its newest delivery drone that will soon be dropping packages from 12 feet in the air in two U.S. cities. The retail giant has long wanted to solve the last leg of package delivery, especially since it launched Amazon Prime's Two-Day delivery offering in 2005. Jeff Bezos first announced drone delivery in 2013, but the service only made a single delivery three years after that. The drone, dubbed MK27-2, will start making deliveries in Lockeford, California, and College Station, Texas, by the end of 2022. The autonomous craft is about five-and-a-half feet in diameter, weighs 80 pounds and can only carry packages that weight less than five pounds.

Amazon plans to begin delivering some packages by drone to homes in a few Northern California communities this year, the company said Monday. Residents of San Joaquin County farming towns Lockeford and Acampo, as well as parts of Lodi, will be able to order "thousands of everyday items" online and can expect a drone to drop them in their backyards in less than an hour, said Av Zammit, an Amazon spokesperson. The Amazon Prime Air drones can carry packages that weigh 5 pounds or less -- such as beauty and cosmetic items, office and tech supplies, batteries and household items -- and will typically be the size of a large shoebox, Zammit said. The company is building a facility in Lockeford from which the drones will launch. Though Amazon Prime Air received certification to commercially fly cargo in 2020, it is still seeking approval from the Federal Aviation Administration and county officials for its plans in San Joaquin County.

Explaining how Prime Air deliveries would work, Amazon said: "Once onboarded, customers in Lockeford will see Prime Air-eligible items on Amazon. They will place an order as they normally would and receive an estimated arrival time with a status tracker for their order.