5/17/2023 0 Comments DeliveriesFor that reason, the agreement between UPS, Matternet and North Carolina was significant, and the operational waver that Wing received from the FAA even more so, because it is so much more far-reaching - it allows drones to fly beyond the pilot’s line of sight and in a much larger area. And until regulators catch up, putting drones to true commercial use is impossible. And drones have been making deliveries in Iceland and Switzerland since 2017.īut U.S. UPS has started using drones at its facilities in Denver as a security measure. They’ve probably been capable of making deliveries for years - indeed, Amazon has been testing Prime Air in private trials in the United Kingdom since 2016. For the rest of us, drones don’t create any additional highway traffic, and their carbon footprint is much lower than that of trucks. For parcel carriers, drones offer the opportunity for on-demand deliveries, as well as all the other advantages of automation - they don’t require wages, benefits or breaks. A 2017 industry report predicted that demand for urban freight delivery grow 40% by 2050.Įvery forward-thinking package delivery company is experimenting with last-mile solutions, including couriers on bikes, package delivery robots, and, of course, drones.ĭrones excel in urban and suburban areas because they can carry small, lightweight parcels on short trips. And those trends show no signs of changing. As customer habits evolve toward placing smaller orders - one or two items at a time instead of three or four - more frequently, those challenges have been exacerbated. Delivery to residential areas is inefficient, which makes it expensive. That’s why this certificate is so significant… it’s also a milestone for the industry because it demonstrates that there’s a way to do drone delivery under the current regulatory structure.”ĭrone delivery could offer third-party parcel carriers a robust last-mile delivery option. “But until now there hasn’t been a clear pathway for traditional aviation regulations, which were designed for manned aircraft, to accommodate it. “Commercial delivery is one of the most significant ways that the public is going to interact with drone technology on a routine basis,” Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership director Mark Blanks told Robotics Business in an April article. The next day, drone technology company Zipline launched a vaccine drone delivery service in Ghana, which can make as many as 600 drone flights to 2,000 healthcare facilities on demand.Īnd in May, a drone at the University of Maryland delivered a kidney from a donor to a transplant recipient. Wing’s approval comes only after “thousands of deliveries to hundreds of testers around the world.” Like the UPS-Matternet service, Wing partnered with local regulators - in this case, the Virginia Tech Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership - to make its case to the FAA. The certification will also make it possible for Wing to conduct the kind of tests necessary to find out whether a drone delivery business is truly practical, such as flying outside the pilot’s line of sight. In April, Wing, a Google spinoff, became the first to receive an Air Carrier Certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration, which allows it to legally make commercial deliveries via drone. In partnership with drone technology company Matternet and state and federal regulators, UPS began delivering medical samples on a hospital campus in Raleigh. In March, UPS became the first third-party package delivery company to complete a commercial delivery via drone. But only in 2019 have commercial drone applications come to fruition. We’ve been hearing about them, and the revolution that futurists say they will bring, for the better part of a decade. The writer’s words pretty well describe the delivery industry’s feelings about drones. “Drone Delivery Services are Actually, Finally Almost Here,” a headline in Wired proclaimed in April.
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