Today, Alphabet announced that Walgreens and Wing have partnered to deliver drone-based goods to a part of Texas' Dallas-Forth Worth area. The Alphabet subsidy will allow the drugstore giant to be the first to benefit from a new rapid drone deployment method.
Wing was testing drone flight at Fort Worth's Hillwoods AllianceTexas Fly Test Center in the weeks leading up to this announcement. It will soon begin testing flights in Frisco and Little Elm, in the region. Additional commercial expansion is expected in the future.
Alphabet has been testing its systems in Australia since 2015 and has made small-scale deliveries to Christiansburg, Virginia, since 2019. According to the company, it is working with FAA to expand into densely populated areas. TechCrunch was told by a representative:
Wing was the first drone operator to become an air carrier certified by the Federal Aviation Administration in April 2019. This allows us to deliver commercial goods miles away and also gives us permission to launch in Virginia in Oct 2019. We are now working towards permissions to expand. In the next few weeks, we will be flying test flights and demonstrating new capabilities in the region. We will first work with the authorities at the federal, state, and local levels to obtain all necessary permissions before we launch our service in DFW.
The first implementation will see drones take off from the Walgreens parking area. The drones containers can be used as hangars and the system can also be placed on rooftops and next to buildings.
This type of service has been available in the United States until now. It was limited to small towns with less complex land use, Alphabet stated in a press release. Its highly reliable aircraft wings and advanced flight planning capabilities and routing capabilities allow it to operate a highly automated drone delivery service even in more complex and crowded environments.
