There is a city where deliveries with drones are working

In Logan, Australia, Wing, a company from the Alphabet galaxy (Google), has completed 100,000 deliveries in two years. Others try but without equally encouraging results

A Wing drone in flight (source: Wing blog) Over 10,000 cups of coffee, 2,700 sushi rolls, 1,700 packs of snacks and 1,200 roast chickens: these are just some numbers that tell what residents of Logan, Australia, have ordered through a drone home delivery service that has been operating for a couple of years in their small town, 300,000 inhabitants near Brisbane, on the country's east coast. To carry out it with its own automated aircraft was Wing, a company launched in 2019 that is preparing to reach 100 thousand orders. So much so that the company, which is part of the Alphabet group (Google's holding company) has gone so far as to declare Logan "the world capital of home delivery via drone".

Wing's design

With one meter wingspan, 1.3 meters long, transport capacity of 1.2 kilograms at a speed of 104.4 kilometers per hour (29 meters per second) and a walkable distance of 20 kilometers, Wing's drone flies 45 meters high and promises to make quick deliveries avoiding traffic and reducing the use of personnel. The fleet of aircraft is in fact managed by software that programs the route to be followed and analyzes the flight conditions, including the weather and ground conditions, delivering the package to the location chosen by the recipient via an app, which gently drops through a cable after having dropped to a height of seven meters.

Between 2019 and 2020 the service made 50 thousand deliveries. As many have been completed in the last eight months, reaching an average frequency of one every 30 seconds during service hours at the beginning of August. Wing already works with 30 partners worldwide, including the Walgreens pharmacy chain, and is also present in Helsinki, Finland and the United States, Virginia, where it has been used for book delivery.

“The most exciting thing about the increase in operations in Logan is that there are hundreds of cities of similar size in the world: New Orleans, Manchester and Florence, to name a few,” explains the company in its blog. eyeing the possibility of expansion: “Over 2 billion people live in cities with less than 500,000 inhabitants. In the not too distant future, deliveries with drones could be replicated, even in larger metropolitan areas ”.

An expanding market

The drone delivery market was worth $ 528 million in 2020, but according to a projection by MarketsandMarkets, aggregate annual growth over the decade will be 53.8%, up to $ 39 billion in 2030. Wing was the first company to obtain the approval of the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States (FAA) in April 2019, albeit for a single operator and not for the entire company, as it then managed to do in the following October Ups.

Just Ups announced the other day that it had started a refrigerated vaccine delivery service in North Carolina, using packages specially designed for drons the. This required the first-of-its-kind FAA approval to charge alkaline and lithium batteries on aircraft in order to monitor the temperatures required by the particular type of transport, 2-8 degrees centigrade.

Despite having demonstrated An early interest in the matter, by launching the Prime Air unit in 2016, Amazon later obtained FAA approval to deliver packages beyond the line of sight of a drone operator, in 2020. And in the UK the test met with a slow and continuous decline, so much so that one hundred people employed in the project were left without work, as the British edition of Wired tells us. Apparently the local program never really took off, due to organizational and engineering difficulties. The drones used, for example, weighed up to 27 kilograms and the mandate was to land them directly outside the customers' homes, a rather complicated precision operation in the last two meters above the ground.

In the world of deliveries , Uber Eats attempted to take off with the drone two years ago by announcing tests in San Francisco. Equipped with six rotors for vertical take-offs, the designed model could fly nearly 18 miles and stay in the air for 18 minutes, carrying enough food for two people.


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Topics

Alphabet Amazon Digital business Drones Food delivery Uber globalData.fldTopic = "Alphabet , Amazon, Digital business, Drones, Food delivery, Uber "

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