It continues to be mixed news in terms of commercial done deliveries in the US.
Supply Chain Digest Says...
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| It’s not just hard to fly these drones on a technological level, on a regulatory level, it’s also just simply extremely hard to fly them in a cost-effective manner. |
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Interestingly, the short and maybe even medium-term trajectory of the US drone industry may depend on the findings of a soon to be released analysis of the issues in a government-sponsored report being finalized by a blue ribbon panel of authors.
It has now been more than a decade ago that then Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos went on the 60 Minutes show in late 2013 to in part announce the on-line giant’s plans to use drones to deliver its on-line orders.
It’s been a slow go since then, as Amazon and others navigate the choppy technology and regulatory waters.
But in recent months there has been some positive news, perhaps most significantly that in January Walmart announced that that by the end of year, it would be capable of using droves for delivery for 75% of the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex. (See Is Drone Delivery Era Finally Here?)
Meanwhile, in 2021 the Federal Aviation Administration asked a panel of academics, drone makers and industry experts to study the safety of operating drones out of a human’s line of sight.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that an FAA spokesperson said the agency now reviewing that committee’s final report. If the report is bullish on non-line of site drone deliveries – essential for the practice to gain any real market traction – it could lead the FAA to liberalize its rules in this area quickly, while a negative finding could set back drone deliveries by many years.
But in other positive news, the FAA recently said is developing rules to make drone delivery “routine, scalable and economically viable.”
There are other bullish announcements around drones in recent months, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Restaurant chain Chick-fil-A recently began using drones to deliver orders to customers that are within 1.2 miles of one of its outlets in central Florida. And a drone maker named Zipline started aerial deliveries in the US. in 2020 and plans to start delivering prescriptions next year on behalf of healthcare provider Cleveland Clinic.
But there are still concerns. Will consumers push back, for example on this sounds and site of drones zooming around for deliveries for the neighbors. That even as nearly all drone designers are working to make their machines quieter.
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 But there may also be financial challenges in some or even many common use cases.
For the average ecommerce order, “it’s actually relatively hard to beat the delivery costs that you would get, for instance, out of a big brown, yellow or white delivery van out there,” Matthias Winkenbach, director of research for the MIT xenter for Transportation and Logistics, told the Journal.
He adds that “It’s not just hard to fly these drones on a technological level, on a regulatory level, it’s also just simply extremely hard to fly them in a cost-effective manner.”
So we’ll see. But SCDigest is betting the FAA-sponsored report will come out positive for commercial drone deliveries
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