Delivery Drones Are Gaining a Clearer Commercial Flight Path

Cassidy Shorland, a council member in Logan, Australia, wanted a refreshing treat on a hot day recently, but didn’t want to get in his car and leave the office. So Shorland opened a 

delivery app, clicked on a mango-flavored juice from a nearby smoothie chain, then walked outside as a big white-and-yellow drone came into view and lowered a tethered box holding his juice.

Shorland, 47, is one of the customers in the small municipality near Brisbane who routinely order things from rotisserie chickens to pain medicine delivered by drone. 

“I don’t need to get away from my desk until I get a notification,” Shorland said, “whilst some of my colleagues have to jump in the car [and] drive to the closest little retail or shopping center.”

It’s the kind of routine service that has mostly eluded drone operators in the U.S. as they’ve navigated regulatory obstacles, community unease and challenging economics over the past decade in a bid to bring new technology to the puzzle of last-mile delivery. 

Industry executives say they have an improved landscape in 2024, however, after federal regulators recently granted several drone-delivery companies permission to fly more freely. That has led several retailers, restaurants and healthcare systems to expand their services across the U.S. 

Drones being checked for flight-worthiness at a Wing facility in Frisco, Texas, in 2022. PHOTO: ANDY JACOBSOHN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

“We’re in a different phase fundamentally as a whole industry than we have been in for the better part of a decade,” said Adam Woodworth, chief executive of Wing, which handles deliveries on behalf of companies such as 

 and DoorDash. “2024 will be, I think, the first real year of scaling for residential drone delivery, particularly in the United States.”

Still, logistics experts caution drones have a long way to go before they become entrenched in commercial parcel distribution in the U.S. 

For the average e-commerce order, “it’s actually relatively hard to beat the delivery costs that you would get, for instance, out of a big brown, yellow or white delivery van out there,” said Matthias Winkenbach, director of research for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Transportation and Logistics. 

A Walmart drone-delivery demonstration. PHOTO: WALMART

“It’s not just hard to fly these drones on a technological level, on a regulatory level, it’s also just simply extremely hard to fly them in a cost-effective manner,” Winkenbach said. 

Attention to drone delivery heated up for many companies during the Covid-19 pandemic, when a surge in online orders pushed more goods into trucks, cars and bikes, adding congestion and pollution on roads. Advocates say the technology is environmentally friendly since the devices typically are battery-powered, reducing emissions for filling orders. 

The Federal Aviation Administration, overseer of the nation’s skies, in the past year has given companies including Wing, a unit of 

, and autonomous drone operator Zipline permission to fly their drones beyond so-called visual line of sight. The requirement that drones remain in sight of a human operator has been a major hurdle for drone operations. 

Robin Riedel, a partner at the McKinsey consulting firm, said the federal approvals pave the way for expansion of airborne delivery. 

“We’re now at this moment and time where we’re ready for prime-time,” Riedel said. “We can move some of these technologies and learnings to the next level and then really start rolling it out in what I would call more and more prime markets.”

Retail giant Walmart, which has been among the companies most aggressively seeking to embed drones in its delivery operations, said it will begin offering drone delivery this year to about 75% of the population of the Dallas-Fort Worth region. 

, which has delivered goods by drone to customers in some U.S. cities since 2022, plans to launch its latest drone model later this year across three U.S. states, as well as in Italy and the U.K. 

Article title：Delivery Drones Are Gaining a Clearer Commercial Flight Path

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