Amazon Prime Air MK27-2

The MK27-2 was the aircraft that finally turned a decade of Prime Air announcements into parcels on doorsteps. The FAA published special-class airworthiness criteria for it in January 2022, Amazon showed it publicly that November, and in December 2022 it began carrying customer orders in exactly two places: Lockeford, California and College Station, Texas. The design is a hexagonal frame about five and a half feet across, weighing roughly 80 lb empty and carrying no more than 5 lb of cargo. Six propellers lift it vertically; once airborne the aircraft rotates into forward flight and the hexagon itself acts as the wing. It cruised at around 50 mph, flew for roughly 25 minutes, and worked a round trip of about 12 km — meaning a delivery address had to sit within a few miles of the site. At the address it descended, scanned the ground for obstructions and released the box from a hover about twelve feet up. The programme it flew was small and it did not last. Amazon closed the Lockeford operation in April 2024, moving the effort to Tolleson, Arizona, and from November 2024 customer deliveries were taken over by the MK30 — an aircraft Amazon says is quieter, flies roughly twice as far and, unlike the MK27-2, is cleared for light rain. Amazon has not published a formal withdrawal date for the MK27-2; it simply stopped being the drone that flies. As a machine the MK27-2 matters less for what it achieved than for what it established: an FAA airworthiness basis for a delivery aircraft, a Part 135 operation, and hard evidence of where the limits sit. Every constraint that shapes drone delivery today — a five-pound parcel, a few miles of radius, a site-by-site regulatory clearance — was first measured on this airframe.

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