Amazon.com Inc. said today it received approval from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to fly its drones longer distances and will use the new license to expand its Prime Air service to more customers.

The FAA approved Amazon with permission to fly Beyond Visual Line of Sight, known as BLVOS, a term used in aviation to describe flying drones where a remote pilot can’t see it directly and instead uses sensors on the drone and radar to guide it. This greatly increases the range that the drones can be flown and allows operations to scale up drone flights to a greater number of people.

Amazon said that to obtain permission to operate beyond line of sight, the company needed to show the FAA that it could operate its drones safely in the sky, including onboard detect-and-avoid systems that could handle civilian aircraft in the same airspace such as hot air balloons, helicopters and other drones.

With the new permissions, Amazon intends to expand its operations in College Station, Texas, where its MK27 drone is being used, to reach customers in more densely populated areas. The drone is capable of reaching a top speed of up to 50 miles per hour and is designed to carry packages weighing less than five pounds, which the company says account for 85% of the orders made through its e-commerce marketplace.

“Our vision has remained unchanged since we started working on Prime Air: to create a safe and scalable way to deliver packages to customers in 30 minutes or less using highly autonomous drones,” the company wrote in the announcement. “To achieve our goal of delivering 500 million packages, per year, by drone, by the end of this decade, we knew we had to design a system capable of serving highly populated areas and that was safer than driving to the store.”

Amazon Prime Air is still an experimental service and the company recently closed down operations in California at its one location in Lockeford, where it initially launched in December 2022. The company still plans to launch a new location in Tolleson, Arizona, later this year, and continue to operate deliveries in other locations.

The BLVOS approval for Amazon comes after Alphabet Inc.’s Wing drone service earned the FAA’s permission to operate remotely without ground observers in December in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area and eventually to scale across the U.S.

Photo: Amazon