Drone delivery technology is ready to rock, says Alphabet’s Wing spinoff, ushering in a wild new era in which small deliveries can touch down within minutes of being ordered, traveling across town at highway speeds. The only holdup at this stage is red tape, and in the few places where that’s been cleared away – like the Australian city of Logan, Queensland – drone deliveries are already proving very popular.
Wing says it’s already made a whopping 50,000 deliveries in Logan, where it kicked off activities in2019through its own app and service, flying out coffees, snack packs, BBQ chickens, sushi rolls, hardware items and a range of other small packages on demand. Eleven local business are acting as suppliers at this point.
That volume, says the company, makes Logan the world’s drone delivery capital. Or at least, the world’s legal drone delivery capital, anyway. Operations in Christiansburg, Virginia, as well as Helsinki, Finland and Canberra, Australia, have kicked in a further 50,000 deliveries between them, and Wing says demand for the super-fast delivery service is growing at an impressive rate wherever it’s made available. The company tells us that deliveries grew by 500 percent from2019to 2,020 and that in Q22021it made more deliveries than in all of 2020.