The little aircraft appeared in the blue sky above a Texas home, deposited its load of sandwiches on the patio, and sped away. Drone deliveries are already a reality in the United States.
Air delivery of pizza and birthday gifts is still not as common as tech leaders predicted, but the service is available in some parts of the country and the rules for that service are catching up.
Skeptics wonder if drone deliveries can ever work on a large scale, but proponents say they’re safer, faster and better for the planet than huge, greenhouse-gas-emitting delivery trucks.
The package landed from an electric drone at Tiffany Bokhari’s home in Frisco, Texas, and was in her hands shortly after she requested it through an app on her cell phone.
“On the soda you can even see the condensation because it’s still cold,” he told AFP after the Wing, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, Wing’s drone departed. The service is new to the area and is on a small scale. In Australia, Wing offers up to 1,000 daily deliveries in one area of the Brisbane metropolitan area. It also makes deliveries in some areas of Finland.
blood and toothbrushes
A handful of companies are already operating drones, or will do so by the end of the year, in parts of Texas, North Carolina or California, with vendors including Israeli startup Flytrex, Wing and Amazon.
In fact, it was the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, who in 2013 introduced a delivery drone and predicted that in five years air shipments would be made routinely from stores to customers’ doors. Things haven’t exactly gone that way. . Amazon’s ambitions suffered a setback last year when during a test flight, one of its drones crashed and caught fire in some bushes.
Other companies advanced more steadily. In April, Wing, which makes deliveries of just over two pounds, announced what it called “the first commercial delivery drone service” in a large metropolitan area of Texas like Dallas-Fort Worth.
“A whole roast chicken … is really a good image for the size of what it fits,” said Jonathan Bass, an executive at Wing.
Food, medicine, and items like toothbrushes are the kind of small, lightweight products that could well be delivered via drone. In some areas of Africa they have already been used for years to deliver essential products such as medical supplies.
Drone shipments of perishable substances such as blood are logical in places where there are infrastructure problems and the best option is air transport.
know
In Africa.
Food, medicine, and items like toothbrushes are the kind of small, lightweight products that could well be delivered via drone. In some areas of Africa they have already been used for years to deliver essential products such as medical supplies.
