The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has granted the internet retailer special permission to test its aerial vehicles without several of the rules that typically bind drone pilots.

The agreement will see Amazon move a step close to Jeff Bezos’s dream of fleets of drones delivering small packages directly to shoppers within 30 minutes.

The tests, which are due to begin imminently, are the most extensive trials of Amazon’s drones anywhere in the world. The company has been developing the technology at a research and development base in Cambridge and is believed to be testing the aircraft in a rural location south east of the city as well as a number of other areas.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/07/26/amazon-to-step-up-uk-tests-of-delivery-drones/

Equipment necessary for a human pilot (such as the cockpit, armor, ejection seat, flight controls, and environmental controls for pressure and oxygen) are not needed, as theoperator runs the vehicle from a remote terminal, resulting in a lower weight and a smaller size than a manned aircraft.

And drones also seem to blur the boundaries between warfare on the one hand and counter-terrorism and law enforcement on the other.

No wonder then that the announcement by the British government that it was an RAF drone strike that had killed an alleged British member of the so-called Islamic State group in Syria was controversial.

British warplanes and drones are not generally operating against targets in Syria. Britain is not at war there. The man killed was a British citizen.

Human rights activists and opponents of capital punishment were quick to warn that the Cameron government was starting down a similar path to that pursued extensively by the United States, for whom the drone has become the counter-terrorist weapon of choice.

The British government insisted that the individual in question was plotting terror attacks in Britain and that there was no other feasible way of thwarting these plans.

This illustrates the extraordinary utility of armed drones - or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as they are also known - but also of the unanswered legal and moral implications of their broadening use.

Equipment necessary for a human pilot (such as the cockpit, armor, ejection seat, flight controls, and environmental controls for pressure and oxygen) are not needed, as the operator runs the vehicle from a remote terminal, resulting in a lower weight and a smaller size than a manned aircraft.

While several nations possess and manufacture unarmed UAV, only the United States, Israel, China, Pakistan and Turkey[3] are at present known to have manufactured operational UCAV as of December 2015.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_combat_aerial_vehicle