Alphabet-owned Wing has said that it will hit a landmark of 100,000 drone deliveries over the weekend. This news comes after two years of the launch of service in the Australian city of Logan which only has 300,000 people. This is happening at a time where there are reports stating that Amazon’s plans of drone deliveries are collapsing. Wing has said that it will be entering new markets in the coming months.
“I think we’ll expand quite a bit. I think we’ll launch new services in Australia, Finland and the United States in the next six months. The capabilities of the technology are probably ahead of the regulatory permissions right now,” said Jonathan Bass, the comms head at Wing.
Of all the deliveries more than half were completed in Logan itself in the last eight months. In the first week of August customers have placed orders for over 4,500 deliveries that works out to be one order every 30 seconds during its delivery window. Over 10,000 cups of coffee have been ordered, alongside 1,700 children’s snack packs, 1,200 hot chooks, 2,700 sushi rolls, and 1,000 loaves of bread.
These drones have a range of 9.6 kms as they are limited by the capacity of their batteries and larger batteries are not possible because that will inhibit their ability to fly. This means the short trips are ideal for food delivery which happens in a package that resembles a McDonalds happy meal. Batteries add weight but apart from that, even parcels add weight, so these drones cannot carry anything more than 1.36 kg. But the system works well with fragile objects like eggs which don’t break.
The drones cruise at a height of 100 to 150 feet in the air and lower down to about 23 feet when they reach the destination. There is a tether that lowers the package to the ground which is unhooked. No person is required to receive the package, something that Amazon’s solution needed.
