Drone Logistics Takes Off

Less than a month after an article in Wired about the apparent failure of Amazon’s efforts to use drone delivery logistics, Alphabet boasts on the corporate blog of Wing, its aerial logistics company created in 2012 and that it has been testing since 2019 that it has already completed more than 100,000 shipments as part of a pilot scheme in Logan, a city of about 300,000 inhabitants in the catchment area of Brisbane, Australia, without any problems.

The figure, which includes items as varied as bread, sushi, roast chicken, children’s snacks, pharmaceutical products and coffee, up to a maximum of around 1.5 kilograms, represents around one shipment every 30 seconds during the hours the service is offered. In the first week of August, for example, some 4,500 deliveries were made in a range of about ten kilometers, conditioned by the drones’ batteries. The drones fly between at around 40 meters height, and descend to seven meters when they reach their destination to unhook the package, made of pyramidal cardboard with standardized measurements, by means of a rope that is automatically unhooked when it reaches the ground, without the need for anyone to be present at that moment to receive it. According to the company, the only suggestion made by the community in which the tests have been carried out is that they try to reduce the drones’ noise level.

Taking into account the commercial deliveries made and the test flights, the company claims to have already made more than half a million deliveries, which is a reasonably well-established level of experience. Wing currently offers services in selected areas in Australia (Logan and Canberra), Finland (Helsinki) and the United States (Virginia), and plans to expand its areas of operation in the coming months, and is looking for companies to add to the 30 partners it already has worldwide, who may see in this type of ultra-fast logistics (delivery in six minutes) a competitive advantage to offer their customers. Other companies, such as UPS or Uber, are doing their own tests to launch services of this type for their own use.

When Jeff Bezos, in an interview in 2013, mentioned drone logistics, many took it as a joke or as a way to get attention. A few years later, drone deliveries, although still in relatively limited areas and with a still limited range of products, is a reality, although it hasn’t been Amazon who has managed to launch it as a viable product. Its expansion now depends solely on factors such as countries’ laws, the availability of a space in which to leave the package (obviously it will never be a suitable service for people living in an apartment without a terrace) or the value proposition that it may represent for certain products and customers.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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