What happened to the fleets of drones who had to deliver us everything, from still hot food to purchases, in very short times flying over cities and countryside and landing directly on the balcony or in the driveway? They haven’t arrived yet. Even if not everything is stopped, certainly the scenario that some startups in the sector but also several giants outlined years ago has not yet materialized. In 2016, for example, Paul Misener, vice president of Amazon, explained in great detail that the drones being tested at the time would deliver the packages in half an hour and that there would be different models depending on the destination: condominiums, villas. , rainy or dusty areas and so on.
The basic idea of using drones is to provide a sustainable and fast option for the so-called “last mile “: Instead of handing hundreds of packages to a single driver and his van (electric at best, most likely diesel) shipping it to dozens of homes and flooding traffic, many separate drones could deliver goods at the same time. A model that however provides a distribution network different from the current oneand in some ways closer to what some new platforms of “quick delivery“Like the Turkish Getir, the German Gorillas (which last autumn closed the largest capital increase in the delivery sector in Europe), recently landed also in Italy, and the Italian Macai and Vado, seem to offer: many media stores square footage that serve macrozones or even large city districts. But that’s another story.
What happened to Amazon
Amazon, as he remembers The Next Web, was the most famous brand to have aimed at it, especially a few years ago. In fact, since 2013 there was already talk of superfast delivery in an hour aboard those small and fascinating white and light blue airplanes developed within the Prime Air program. And if already in the summer of 2020 the US Federal Aviation Administration had granted permission to conduct operations of this type, Wired UK told the following year of over 100 skipped jobs in the UK – where drone deliveries had been in the works since 2016 – right in Prime Air. Not surprisingly, Alphabet (with its subsidiary Wing) and the Israeli Flytrex they have long since surpassed the “shop of the world“, which even in the United States remained stuck in the hype produced some time ago.
How many deliveries are made with drones
Yet deliveries with drones did not remain in the wishes of top managers. According to the numbers of McKinsey & Co. over the last three years they are counted over 660 thousand commercial deliveries with these small flying devices, obviously without considering the test and test flights. Everyday more than 2 thousand deliveries via drone take place all over the world: they are very few, obviously, and far from that futuristic scenario that many had in mind but also significant of a phenomenon technically possible in many areaswhich must find its winning model and which will probably never arrive in certain contexts but will be destined to integrate and enrich the current delivery methods e-commerce, food and health delivery and other products. In any case, analysts’ forecasts speak of 1.5 million deliveries in 2022 from 500 thousand last year.
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The protagonists of the sector
In short, something is moving, and the current protagonists are basically four. The aforementioned Israeli Flytrex for example, it is the first to have launched the first regular and approved delivery service with drone on demand a Reykjavik, in Iceland. It was 2017. He has been working on a similar service for some time in some cities of the North Carolina and already offers five-minute deliveries of groceries weighing up to 3 kilos and a distance of 8 kilometers from warehouses.
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Wing Aviationinstead, it started in Australia, particularly in the borough of North Canberra and Logan, Queensland. Last year it made over 140 thousand deliveries (with a growth of 600% on 2020) and already in the first two months of 2022 it exceeded 30 thousand. The record was recently set: over a thousand in one day, roughly one every 25 seconds. But the Alphabet-controlled company has tests in Virginia. Then there are the Irish Mannawhich operates with thousands of flights to Balbriggan, north of Dublin, but also in the splendid Galway which has 65,000 completed deliveries to its credit and the Indian Anra in partnership with the Swiggy home delivery platform. Impossible to forget JD.com, the Chinese e-commerce giant that since 2016 has had a delivery service with drones in rural areas of the country, used during the pandemic also to distribute medicines, masks and tampons in the most difficult areas to reach. Just last month the service was made official and the plan is partly different from that of other players in the sector: the strategy seems to rely on a dense network of airports for drones where people can go to collect goods.
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The sectors in which drones are already a reality
We must not forget that drones are already a reality in a great variety of fields: from monitoring of cultivated fields and grazing herds assistance for the search and rescue operations after catastrophic events up to the inspection of buildings and critical infrastructures. A very important sector is that of the delivery of small parcels in medical or military field, often in remote areas or areas that are difficult to reach by car. The richest drone fleet in the world is that of the US Zipline Internationalwhich has made this specialty its DNA: it also deals with pharmaceutical deliveries in some areas of Rwanda e Ghana, releasing packages which then touch the ground accompanied by a small parachute. It also happened with the deliveries of Covid-19 vaccines. Suffice it to say that, as of last September, more than 75% of the deliveries of blood bags outside the Rwandan capital Kigali took place via the small planes of the San Francisco company, with an autonomy that can cover a hundred miles, approximately. 160 kilometers. Just with Zipline the colossus Walmart last November piloted an on-demand service in Arkansas and Arizona for food and drug deliveries. While in some cities in North Carolina and North Dakota the supermarket chain uses Flytrex quadcopters.
The startup also moves in healthcare Matternet which manages a fleet in Lesotho and recently in Abu Dhabi, as well as in North Carolina together with UPS where it has also delivered the vaccines. Also Dhl has conducted pilot projects in this area, since 2018, with his “Parcelcopter” which was then retired as well as the Austrian post office in 2017, or the British Royal Mail. The most recent is a two-week test last October with Windracers drones in the Orkney Islands off the north Scottish coast. The same Windracers, among other things, it specializes in the use of drones for humanitarian, research and environmental protection purposes. But his are large drones, not comparable to the quadcopters of the common imagination.
As the British Royal Aeronautical Society, the oldest aviation company in the world, explains, in a long analysis, the road to seeing regular deliveries made by drones over our heads is quite complicated. The construction of a fleet of this kind in fact clashes with technical, regulatory and obstacles related to daily and ecosystem contingency. From low-altitude navigation, which is very dangerous because it is necessary to avoid a large number of obstacles with increasingly sophisticated navigation systems, to the need for a human remote control as required by the European Union Aviation Safety Authority up to the regulations (different from country to country with many weight limits, overflight, dimensions and so on) and, of course, to the market issues to be asked: Would there really be enough demand for that kind of service? If it is true, as experts in decision-making neuroscience say, that we perceive time as a cost, then the speed of drones should have an undeniable advantage on its side – if it is able to bring us the products intact and smoothly for delivery. Even if we should pay for it.
The other problems, including the relationship with wild animals
Then there are ethical and privacy aspects for equipping with video cameras, related to insurance aspects in case of accidents in flight, problems with noise pollution and above all at the relationship of these flying objects to birds and wildlife generally to which their explosion could lead to major problems. In reality, this is a potential impact that is still not fully understood: a recent report by the European Environment Agency explained that “since drones will fly at altitudes below 500 meters, they are likely to come into contact with wild animals. In addition to the risk of affecting wildlife, some animals may see a low-flying drone as one threat or even as one teach. There have been numerous incidents in which birds attacked drones, including one in which Wing had to ground his delivery drones in the Harrison suburb of Canberra after they were attacked by crows. “
In short, the route is turbulent. A study by the European Sesar program has estimated that around 70,000 deliveries will be made in Europe in 2035. Another one from Airbus, on the other hand, seems infinitely more optimistic, imagining almost 17,000 deliveries per hour in Paris alone, again within a dozen years. They seem numbers shot at random, and in some cases they are, because they are affected by all the unresolved aspects mentioned above on which no one is able to provide an exhaustive answer at the moment. One thing is certain: Amazon Prime, FedEx and Ups are currently delivering 10 billion packages a year in the United States alone. If even a very large and almost unattainable percentage given the current state of the sector – Aerosociety places 10% – were entrusted to drones, this would result in a billion annual deliveries in the USA. However, 90% would be managed by the traditional network made up of planes, trucks, vans and to a lesser extent freight trains.