CAMBRIDGE, England – Amazon has begun a commercial trial of its Prime Air autonomous drone delivery service, beginning with a single fulfillment center in Cambridge, England. The first delivery, which took place on December 7, took just 13 minutes from the customer placing an order. There’s a promotional video of the first Prime Air delivery embedded below.

To begin with, just two Amazon customers have been invited into the Prime Air trial, and they both live near the fulfilment centre. The customers can request drone delivery seven days a week, but only during daylight hours, and the weather has to be within certain parameters. The first Prime Air delivery, in case you were wondering, was an Amazon Fire TV stick and a bag of popcorn.

As the video accurately shows, a Prime Air delivery currently goes something like this:

  1. The customer places an order
  2. The order is packed at the Amazon warehouse by a human
  3. The box is placed on a conveyor belt and picked up by the drone
  4. The drone glides down a track until it’s outside
  5. The drone takes off and flies autonomously (with GPS) to the customer’s location
  6. The drone spots a special marker on the ground in a field
  7. The drone lands on the marker and leaves the package behind
  8. The happy customer treks out to the field and picks up the package.Amazon says it will eventually expand the trial to a few dozen, and then a few hundred shoppers who live within range of the Cambridge warehouse. As far as we’re aware, the current stock of battery-powered Prime Air drones (which look quite different from last year’s drones) still have a maximum capacity of 5 pounds (2.3kg).