Why did We Hear 5 Years Ago That Online Orders Would Be Delivered By Drone, And This Is Nowhere Near Happening Yet?

Question

Why did We Hear 5 Years Ago That Online Orders Would Be Delivered By Drone, And This Is Nowhere Near Happening Yet?

In: Economics

Answer 1

The issue in the US is the regulatory environment.

There is a provisional license that companies can get from the FAA to do commercial drone delivery in other locations through the UAS Beyond program, but its onerous to get, only allows a limited number of drones operating in limited areas, and requires a human to be able to take remote control of the drone at all times. If you are licensed as part of that program, the only area that you can do large scale unmanned drones is in a small part of Dallas (and only as of last Friday). You can deliver to other areas, but there are significant limitations on how, where, and when you can do that.

The short of why things aren’t moving faster is that the regulatory environment simply doesn’t exist for it. Unmanned delivery drones are treated the same as commercial cargo flights from a regulatory perspective. That means that your small Amazon drone flying 2 miles from their warehouse to your house is, from the FAA’s point of view, the same as a Fed Ex 747 flying from New York to Los Angeles. Congressional action is likely required before this changes substantially.

The EU regulatory environment for unmanned drones is even more restrictive, plus the high density of most EU cities means that the practicality of drone deliveries is a lot lower than it is in the US.

Getting back to the practicality of drones in high density areas – there was a big push to do drone deliveries in Japan a few years ago. The regulatory environment in Japan is very lax, so that wasn’t an issue. However, orders were close to 0 and all of those services have basically shut down.

The main issues the Japanese had were that drones couldn’t deliver directly to high medium and high density buildings. Instead, they would deliver to Amazon locker-esq drop off points, which were far enough away from most people that it defeated the purpose of ordering from Amazon style delivery services.