Drone deliveries might be going mainstream soon.
Wing, a drone delivery venture owned by Google parent Alphabet, has been building its operations since 2012 and its drones have made more than 400,000 deliveries in the U.S., Europe and Australia, reported Yahoo! Finance.
The company is “currently testing its services in Texas, Virginia and at a facility in California.”
The drones are 4.9 feet wide and 4.3 feet long, fly at around 65 miles per hour and up to 150 feet high.
“The fleet rests at charging stations called ‘nests,’ and one flies to a store when an order comes in.
The drone, while hovering, lowers a tether so an employee can attach the product inside a box.
Then the cord is reeled up and off the drone goes.
The orders can be tracked by customers in real time, and the drone lowers its tether and unclips the item once it arrives,” wrote the outlet.
Customers are mostly ordering “forgotten goods,” Wing CEO Adam Woodworth told Yahoo Finance.
“Those ‘oopsie’ moments when you get home from the store and realize limes never made it into your shopping cart,” Woodworth said.
“Within minutes, you can have that delivered right to your door.”
There are reportedly restrictions, however. Deliveries can only take place during the day, typically between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., to avoid the dark.
The drones can only travel up to 12 miles round-trip, and the items they carry cannot exceed 2.5 pounds.
According to Yahoo!, Google is not alone in the unmanned aerial vehicle space.
Amazon’s drone delivery service—called Prime Air—launched its new MK30 drones in 2022 and recently received regulatory approval to fly them.
Walmart also has a large drone delivery footprint, and UPS has been operating a fleet of drones for package deliveries.
Wing aims to make drone delivery an established part of the delivery ecosystem available to customers nationwide by 2035.
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