The drone delivery startup, Alphabet wing owned and managed by Google’s parent company, Alphabet is poised to begin its commercial delivery operations to homes and local businesses in the US. This comes just after it was awarded an Air Carrier Certification from the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). This is a resounding feat for Alphabet Wing as it becomes the first of its kind to be given the certification. This Certification for clarity in mind, enables Alphabet Wing drones to fly when not in the line of sight of drone operators and as well over civilians.
Blacksburg and Christiansburg areas of Virginia are the locations where the Wing will run its maiden commercial delivery pilot services, as part of the Integrated Pilot Program (IPP) later in 2019, which is due to start in the coming weeks. For the record, Wing already operates a commercial air delivery service at Canberra in Australia, this makes the US its second base of operation. Overtime, it will start trials at Helsinki, Finland in Europe.
Report from Wing -“This is a significant first step in a process that will ultimately allow Wing to build a business that uses delivery drones to transport important items to be people when they need them the most, more quickly, safely and conveniently, and with a low carbon footprint,”...“The thousands of deliveries we’ve done to the hundreds of testers we’ve been delivering around the world have proven the value of our technology — whether it be delivering pharmacy items to the elderly, or a meal to parents whose children are sick, or a hot coffee to shift workers and others on tight schedules.”
For the past six years, Wing has been on this project with its mission of building small, lightweight aircraft, along with a navigation system able to safely deliver small packages on demand. Alphabet's Wing drones currently have a record of 70,000 test flights and have made more than 3,000 deliveries to people in Australia, where the service is currently in full operational status.
The Alphabet subsidiary, revealed it has been in talks with the FAA since April 2017, in keeping up with international safety standards across its fleet of drones, services, employees and management processes. In the course of time, Alphabet's Wing will reach out to businesses and community members in Blacksburg and Christiansburg for promotional survey, user feedback and advertorials.
Technology, if for anything is known to reinvent itself, several other drone deliveries will begin their US operations in the coming months, competition could mount on for Wing. Can it's popularity withstand the ever increasing innovations that might result from the never-ending, drone drag race.
Well, that's left to be seen.