AERIAL DELIVERIES A mazon founder Jeff Bezos famously started the retailer in a rented garage in Washington state, going on to turn it into one of the biggest companies on the planet. Yet for a man who has made the seemingly impossible a reality, there is one dream he has yet to fulfill. Ten years on from an interview with US broadcaster CBS, in which Bezos predicted that we were just four or five years out from last-mile drone delivery, his goal of populating the skies of our towns and cities with Amazon delivery drones still seems a long way off. Although Prime Air, the Amazon offshoot launched in 2013, has succeeded in building a fleet of airborne drones, the scale of its operations has been modest to say the least. According to a report on US network CNBC, as of May 2023, Amazon had completed just 100 deliveries in two small US markets. However, the company has announced that it will bring drone deliveries to the UK and Italy next year, as well as a third location in the US. Ian Kerr, founder and host of the Postal Hub podcast, is not surprised by the relative failure of the last-mile drone delivery dream, which he says has never made much economic sense. “There was this fantasy about drone delivery, that it would be liberating, fast and environmentally friendly,” says Kerr. “And the reality is that you’ve got this buzzing machine that delivers one thing at a time in the last mile, and that’s not a very efficient way to go about things.” But while the Jetson-like dream (or nightmare) of parcel drones whizzing back and forth across the skies is yet to be realized, there certainly has been progress. Alphabet’s drone subsidiary, Wing, for example, claims to have made 330,000 deliveries, primarily in Australia, where it carries orders for supermarket chain Coles and online food delivery service DoorDash. Earlier this year, US supermarket giant Walmart also announced that it is now operating 36 drone delivery hubs across the US via partnerships with several drone operators. Although Kerr is skeptical about many of the claims made on behalf of drone delivery, he by no means discounts the technology. “There are use cases for drones, where the drone is the best way to deliver, or where it’s very difficult to deliver effectively or efficiently by any other means,” says Kerr. “I think that drone delivery has to find its niche, where it’s going to be effective and profitable and not a nuisance to the people who live near the flight path.” Ian Kerr, founder and host, Postal Hub podcast DRONE DELIVERY HAS TO FIND ITS NICHE, WHERE IT’S GOING TO BE EFFECTIVE AND PROFITABLE AND NOT A NUISANCE” As an example of one of those niches, he points to the US drone maker Zipline, whose aircraft are being deployed to carry blood and other essential medical freight in sub-Saharan Africa. In September, Zipline, which is one of Walmart’s drone partners, received clearance from the US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) to fly beyond line-of-sight (BLOS) in US airspace, paving the way for the company to be able to make deliveries there. Zipline recently unveiled a next-generation rotorcraft drone, but it’s important to note that until now most of its operations have been accomplished using a glider-like drone called the P1 Zip. Capable of 193km round trips, the P1 Zip’s fixed-wing design means that it requires a landing strip for take-off and landing. This landing requirement makes fixed-wing drones unsuitable for last-mile delivery. However, they use less energy than rotorcraft drones, which means they can be built bigger. For postal and parcel companies, this opens the door to bulk, or middle-mile, drone delivery, a far more realistic prospect than last mile in the short to medium term, according to Chris Paxton, who heads the drone trial operations at the UK’s Royal Mail. “Effectively, there are two use cases for UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] for parcel carriers: delivering to people’s actual addresses, and the bulk movement of mail. We’ve focused on the latter,” says Paxton. He gives two main reasons for this strategy. The first is a reluctance to replace the mail carriers who, as the face of last-mile delivery, remain “one of our biggest selling points”. The second reason is safety. “If you’re flying between two fixed points, you can obviously manage the risk a lot more easily than you can if you’re flying to multiple addresses.” Fit for purpose 330k aerial drone deliveries to date, mainly in Australia ABOVE: Royal Mail collaborated with Skyports Drone Services in its most recent trial BELOW: Rotorcraft drones were chosen for the trial due to a lack of landing strips Wing has made Remote trials So far, Royal Mail has conducted four drone delivery trials, with a fifth ongoing this winter. All the trials have been on offshore UK islands that are difficult to access by conventional methods of transportation. 32 www.ParcelandPostalTechnologyInternational.com December 2023