Amazon Prime Air Drone Delivery Operations Slashed in Italy – What Now?

Amazon has halted its plans to run its commercial Prime Air drone delivery operations in Italy, effectively shelving the project after what sounded, on paper, like a very promising start.

According to an article from Reuters, Amazon made the layoff call after a “strategic review,” saying the broader business and regulatory environment in Italy does not support the company’s long-term goals for the drone program.

That decision lands less than a year after Prime Air completed initial delivery tests in San Salvo, in the Abruzzo region of Italy, and after what Amazon described as positive engagement with Italy’s aviation regulator.

Italy’s civil aviation authority, ENAC, reportedly called the decision unexpected, and linked it to internal Amazon policy following recent financial developments involving the group.

Why Did They Shut It Down, and What Does It Mean for the Rest of Prime Air?

Amazon previously mentioned opening sites Italy and the UK as part of its next wave of expansion, with services expected to go public in late 2024 alongside a third U.S. location. Italy got far enough to run real-world tests in 2024. Now the program is paused with no clear restart date, and the writing on the wall is clear as day: even if/when we reopen, there is no guarantee we won’t fire you again two weeks later.

Prime Air’s Long Arc: Hype in 2013, Reality in 2025

Prime Air has been public since Jeff Bezos introduced the idea on 60 Minutes in December 2013, pitching the concept as ultra-fast delivery by drone.

But the gap between “demo video” and “global enterprise” has been brutal. Reporting over the years has described technical setbacks, crashes, reorganizations, and layoffs, with estimates putting Amazon’s entire Prime Air investment in the billions.

DroneXL Context: Why Italy Getting Cut Feels Eerily Familiar

This news hits differently when you have lived inside Prime Air.

From 2022 to 2023, I worked Prime Air’s R&D campaign, from Pendleton, Oregon to Bryan and College Station, Texas. I was an AVA (Autonomous Vehicle Assistant), and while I was not the one hitting “launch,” I did pretty much everything else that keeps a flight test machine moving.

That included giving design input that later fed into the MK30 era, and building out a battery storage facility with fire suppression. Those battery packs were not cheap, and the operational footprint behind “drone delivery” is way bigger than most people realize.

And then there is the part nobody outside the program sees.

I remember showing up for a morning brief in early 2023 and realizing roughly 70 to 80% of my coworkers were gone. No explanation you would call transparent. Morale was tanked. The pressure was already high, especially with Lockeford’s early operational struggles, and it was clear the org was in “deliver results now” mode.

That is why Italy being shut down for “business and regulatory environment” reasons evokes deja vu for me. Prime Air is not just fighting physics, autonomy, noise, safety, and public outcry. It appears to be fighting internal patience, and the reality of what a single delivery actually costs when you include everything behind the scenes.

Prime Air is Far from the Only Program That Has Been Targeted

Prime Air is not the only Amazon bet that has seen a hard pivot. Amazon’s Scout delivery robot program, for example, was pulled back from live testing in 2022, with the company saying it would “reorient” the effort after learning the program was not meeting customer needs.

Inside Prime Air, I remember people saying we were “lucky we weren’t the Scout team” because that whole department got wiped in one morning. Regardless of company or department, every reader should understand this one thing: they will cut experimental programs fast when they need to “trim the fat”.

Italy’s Out, but Prime Air’s Challenges Are not

Even in the U.S., Prime Air has continued dealing with incidents and investigations. Reuters has reported on FAA and NTSB scrutiny after crashes in Arizona, and an FAA probe after an MK30 struck an overhead cable in Texas.

None of this automatically means Prime Air is dead. But it does show how fragile expansion plans can be when you are trying to scale beyond tightly controlled pilot areas.

If Italy, a country where Prime Air had already achieved initial tests and regulator engagement, can be shut down indefinitely, every other planned market should read this as a warning: progress is not the same thing as momentum.

DroneXL’s Take

Prime Air is one of the most ambitious delivery ideas Amazon has ever pitched to the public, and it is also one of the clearest examples of how “cool tech” turns into “expensive operations” the second you try to scale it.

Italy getting cut two years after Amazon publicly highlighted it as part of the next expansion wave feels like the same story Prime Air employees have watched for the past decade: big vision, real progress, then a sudden internal reset when the situation even slightly changes.

Let me know down below if you’d be interested in having a drone delivery service operate in your neighborhood, or if you’d be one of the first ones to grab a shotgun!

Photo credits: Amazon