Alphabet’s Wing drone delivery service begins in Canberra this week

Guzman y Gomez is one of the companies that have signed up to Wing’s drone delivery service.

Alphabet spin-off Wing is finally beginning drone delivery services in north Canberra, after addressing public concerns about noise made during earlier trials.

Drone delivery starts at the end of the week and will be available initially to only 100 eligible homes in the suburbs of Crace, Palmerston and Franklin as part of Wing’s Early Flyer program.

“We expect to gradually expand to more customers in Harrison and Gungahlin in the coming weeks and months,” the Google associated company says in a statement.

Wing says customers can order fresh food, hot coffee or over-the-counter chemist items. They can order their goods using Wing’s mobile app, and have them delivered directly to their homes by drone in minutes.

Wing has set up an “early flyers” scheme where customers get access to invite-only events and experiences.

“Whether you’re a parent with a sick child at home and have run out of baby paracetamol, a busy professional who forgot to pick up fresh bread during your regular weekly shop, or you simply just want to order your morning flat white without the hassle of having to drive to the cafe, Wing has teamed up with local Canberra businesses to give customers the opportunity to have a range of goods delivered in a handful of minutes.”

Launch partners include Kickstart Expresso, Capital Chemist, Pure Gelato, Jasper + Myrtle, Bakers Delight, Guzman y Gomez, and Drummond Golf.

Wing has been testing drone delivery in Australia since 2014. During recent tests it delivered food, small household items and over-the-counter chemist products more than 3000 times to homes.

During the trials, Wing used powerful 12-rotor drones weighing about 4.5kg. Each could carry a 1.5kg package. However noise and loss of privacy from overhead drones bothered residents sparking complaints during a trial at Bonython, in Canberra’s south.

Wing promised to modify the drones, saying it would redesign propellers to make the drones quieter and lower-pitched.

The Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) told The Australian that Wing had received special permission to operate the service, provided it used the quieter drones.

Spokesman Peter Gibson says the drone airspace is “rigorously separated” from conventional airspace.
He said CASA is looking at how it will manage airspace over cities in the emerging era of commercial drones, drones used for emergency services and other uses.

He said in the future drones would talk to each other and be pretty much autonomous. “That’s the aspirational goal,” he says.

“At the moment, you’ve got to have that done in an area where manned aircraft are not going to be operating.”

He says Wing has to monitor aircraft radio frequencies to make sure that regular aircraft are not about to fly through their airspace. “They (Wing) have an unmanned traffic management system running it,” he says. “There is a human being overseeing that, but a human being is not actually flying the drones. The system is flying the drones.”

The longer-term issue for CASA is how it manages these systems of commercial drones in future. Would it have to divide up airspace so that emergency service drones flew at, say, 3000 feet and commercial drone traffic at, say, 5000 feet, and so on?

“The ultimate goal would be to integrate them all together so that they could be all safely separated and share the airspace. But you’re not going to get there tomorrow, even in the next years.

“In the interim, the approach … is to block out bits of airspace and say this is the drone delivery airspace in the north of Canberra. It doesn’t say other aircraft can’t use that space but it’s up to the drone delivery people to monitor that.”