Starting Thursday, some Dallas-area shoppers will gain a no-roads-required option for getting certain household products delivered: drones operated by Wing, a subsidiary of Google’s parent firm Alphabet.
The company announced the news Monday in an email newsletter. “Wing is finally set to launch the first ever commercial drone delivery service in a major US metropolitan area in just three days, on Thursday, April 7,” CEO Adam Woodworth wrote.
Service will commence in two northern suburbs of Dallas—Frisco and Little Elm—and feature deliveries of “health and wellness products,” from Walgreens, Woodworth wrote. Wing will also transport ice cream from Blue Bell Creameries (which he assured “will stay frozen on those hot Texas summer days!”), pet medicines from easyvet, and Texas Health first-aid kits.
These Dallas deliveries will follow a concept Wing announced in October of staging drones at retail locations that Wing operators oversee remotely.
“I do want to set clear expectations: not everyone who lives within range of our drones will be able to order on Day 1,” Woodworth said in the newsletter. “We’re going to invite customers in groups to make sure everyone has a good first experience with drone delivery.”
Wing, launched in 2014 as Project Wing, operates battery-electric aircraft with 12 rotors and two propellers that fly at up to 64.9mph, with a range of 12 miles. They can carry 2.6 pounds of cargo in a package suspended just below the fuselage on a cable; at a delivery point, the drone spools out the cable to allow a recipient to detach the package.
Palo Alto-based Wing will not charge customers for deliveries around Dallas and has provided them for free in other markets; it’s unclear if that will change. In October, Wing’s Australian policy and community-affairs head Jesse Suskin told the New Daily, an Australian news site, that Wing was talking with partners about an undescribed delivery-charge model that “suits everybody.”
Australia has been Wing’s largest test to date. After starting service in some Canberra suburbs in 2019, the company had neared 100,000 deliveries there by August. As of March 1, Wing had completed more than 200,000 commercial drone deliveries worldwide.
In the US, Wing began delivery tests in 2019 in the smaller market of Christiansburg, Va. Its service will have a much bigger stage in Dallas, and its drones will have autonomous company in the skies should FedEx choose to launch its own drone-delivery tests there sometime next year.
