Article content

VANCOUVER – Spurned by U.S. regulators, Amazon.com has turned to the one country where flying delivery robots are still welcome: Canada.

On Monday, the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper revealed that the online retail giant is testing its latest prototypes for package-carrying drones at a top-secret site in British Columbia.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Amazon.com moves drone testing to secret Canadian location after U.S. too slow granting permits Back to video

“We are rapidly experimenting and iterating on Amazon Prime Air … including outdoors at a rural test site in Canada,” wrote Amazon spokesperson Kristen Kish in an email to the National Post.

First announced in 2013, Prime Air is a proposed arm of Amazon.com that would use autonomous drones travelling as fast as 80 km/h to rush packages to urban locations around the world.

“One day, seeing Amazon Prime Air will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today,” wrote the company in a petition to U.S. regulators.

Located a mere 600 meters from the U.S. border, the Canadian testing grounds fulfill a lingering threat by Amazon to take their drone research abroad unless U.S. regulators could speed up their glacial approval process for unmanned aircraft