Alphabet’s drone delivery service starts to take off

Wing, a subsidiary of a major US company, is currently conducting a live test in three cities. Although the announcement was prompted by a news story in Australia, the official blog post states that Wing has reached 100,000 orders in the very early stages of drone delivery.

Half of the deliveries have been made in Logan, Australia, in the last eight months – a city where the service was launched two years ago. According to the post, orders included 10,000 cups of coffee, 1,700 children’s packed lunches, 1,200 roast chicken portions, 2,700 sushi rolls and 1,000 loaves of bread.

As they write, in the first week of August, orders were placed for 4,500 deliveries in Logan, meaning that in the time the service was available, a request was registered every 30 seconds – they note that during that week, residents of the city were quarantined due to the coronavirus outbreak.

In addition to the Australian city, live testing is currently underway in Helsinki, Finland, and Christianburg, USA, where goods can be ordered from Wing under certain conditions. The company’s drones have a range of up to 10 kilometres, can deliver products weighing up to 1.2 kilograms and are committed to delivering orders within six minutes.

Experience so far has shown that the vast majority of customers are satisfied, with almost all of the residents in the cities taking part in the trial supporting the drone delivery service. Wing also said that they will start operations in additional cities in the coming months.