Apparently, Amazon Prime Air--the drone delivery system Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wowed us all with on 60 Minutes back in December--is definitely not a joke. The company is currently hiring for the project in Seattle, Cambridge and London, and TechCrunch sniffed out a series of new hires with impressive resumes that have climbed aboard the delivery drone.
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Last month, Amazon brought on Paul Viola, who boasts a Ph.D from MIT, as Prime Air's Vice President of Science. Viola previously worked across town at Microsoft on Bing, honing the search engine's precision so well that it made Google sweat and obviously caused Bezos to desire the man for a project obsessed with precision.
Other hires make sense in a tangential way as well. Bezos brought on Avi Bar-Zeev, co-founder of the start-up Mountain View bought and eventually turned into Google Earth. Prime Air has also been bringing in employees with backgrounds at Lockheed Martin, MIT and Boeing (also based in Seattle).
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Oh yea, they also added a real-life astronaut. Neil Woodward, a NASA astronaut from 1998 to 2008, is Prime Air's Technical Program Manager, and "Responsible for Flight Test, Safety, Risk Management, and Certification efforts for the Amazon Prime Air team," according to his LinkedIn page.
However, Prime Air still has to impress the Federal Aviation Administration. The organization released regulations this summer barring delivery drones ("model aircraft") with language specifically pointed at Prime Air's marketing.
