Wing drone deliveries see 500% growth

Google’s Wing drone delivery company is now the largest in the world and is set to complete 100,000 deliveries in the coming weekend.

Wing’s business grew by 500% in 2020, and has made more deliveries in the first quarter of 2021 than the whole of 2020. The firm plans to expand its drone delivery operations in the US in the next year having already established itself in Australia and Finland.

The Queensland Australian operations of Wing is the biggest single drone delivery operation in the world. Using hybrid fixed wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) these carry parcels of around 1.2kg and have a six mile radius, within which they can deliver parcels within six minutes. These decent from a flight level of 45 metres to seven metres where they lower and release packages automatically to the customer.

The drone delivery service is extremely popular among customers who can order things like hot coffee and ice cream. Wing’s head of communications, Jonathan Bass, said “Wing is operating live, automated drone delivery services in Australia, Finland and the U.S, and making thousands of deliveries each week to customers, on-demand. Our operation in Queensland, Australia is the largest residential drone delivery service in the world, available daily to 19 suburbs with a population of 110,000 people. We’ve made nearly 100,000 deliveries to customers on demand, on top of hundreds of thousands of additional test flights. These deliveries have primarily been made directly to homes, but also to offices and apartment buildings, and we’ve even offered delivered to customers on-demand in public parks.  

Wing has built a drone delivery platform not to deliver our own stuff, but to deliver everyone else’s. Our aircraft is lightweight, we require very little space to operate and flight systems are highly automated—it’s easy for a wide range of businesses to set up and use nearly anywhere at a fraction of the cost of ground delivery.”  

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