Delivery drones are so fast they can zip a pint of ice cream to a customer’s driveway before it melts.
Yet the long-promised technology has been slow to take off in the United States. More than six years after the Fede
ral Aviation Administration approved commercial home deliveries with drones, the service mostly has been confined to a few suburbs and rural areas.
That could soon change. The FAA proposed a new rule last week that would make it easier for companies to fly drones outside of an operator’s line of sight and the
refore over longer distances. A handful of companies do that now, but they had to obtain waivers and certification as an air carrier to deliver packages.
While the rule is intended to streamline the process, authorized retailers and drone companies that have tested fulfilling orders from the sky say they
plan to make drone-based deliveries available to millions more U.S. households.
Walmart’s multistate expansion
Walmart and Wing, a drone company owned by Google parent Alphabet, currently provide deliveries from 18 W
almart stores in the Dallas area. By next summer, they expect to expand to 100 Walmart stores in Atlanta; Charlotte, North Carolina; Houston; and Orlando and Tampa, Florida.
After launching its Prime Air delivery service in College Station, Texas, in late 2022, Amazon received FAA permis
sion last year to operate autonomous drones that fly beyond a pilot’s line of sight. The e-commerce company has since expan
d its drone delivery program to suburban Phoenix and has plans to offer the service in Dallas, San Antonio, Texas, and Kansas City.
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The concept of drone delivery has been around for well over a decade. Drone maker Zipline, which works with
Walmart in Arkansas and the Dallas-Fort Worth area, began making deliveries to hospitals in Rwanda in 2016. Isr
ael-based Flytrex, one of the drone companies DoorDash works with to carry out orders, launched drone delivery to households in Iceland in 2017.
But Wing CEO Adam Woodworth said drone delivery has been in “treading water mode” in the U.S. for years, w
ith service providers afraid to scale up because the regulatory framework wasn’t in place.
“You want to be at the right moment where there’s an overlap between the customer demand, the partner demand, the technical readiness and the regulatory readiness,” Woodworth said. “I think that we’re reaching that planetary alignment right now.”