The FAA just cleared UPS delivery drones for longer-range flights. Regulators in the US have just cleared the way forward for UPS delivery drones to fly past the visual line of sight.
FAA Cleared UPS Delivery Drones
UPS delivery drones according to new reports are now allowed to fly longer distance flights beyond the sight of ground operators, the Federal Aviation Administration in a press release on Wednesday revealed. This is the kind of move that rightly opens the door for drone delivery companies such as Wing, FedEx, and Zip to deliver packages across a vast and wider area and get to service more customers.
UPS Flight Forward, which is a UPS subsidiary that is focused on drone delivery, can now deliver small packages way beyond the visual line of sight (BVLOS) without any spotters on the ground monitoring the route as well as skies for other aircraft, making use of Matternet M2 drones. The FAA also announced authorization for two other companies to fly beyond sight for the sake of commercial purposes. That in question includes uAvionix Corp. and, just in the previous week, Phoenix Air Unmanned, an infrastructure inspection company.
UPS Got Government Approval to Operate Its Drone Service In 2019
UPS initially got government approval to operate its drone service back in 2019, which is the very same year that the FAA authorized the service of Alphabet’s Wing to operate commercially. The company in question first focused on building a drone delivery network for US hospital campuses.
Walmart Partnering With Wing
The news in question for those that don’t know comes just a couple of days after Walmart announced that it is partnering with Wing to make deliveries in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Walmart so far, has already made more than 10,000 deliveries across seven states through its partners, DroneUp, Flytrex, and Zipline. The new partnership in question will enable the retailer to help deliver to an extra 60,000 homes.
Other Drone Delivery Programs Having Difficult Times
Yet not all of the drone delivery programs in the industry have had a smooth go of things, such as Amazon’s drone delivery service Prime Air. The service back in May had just made 100 deliveries in California and Texas, which is the two locations that it is operating on. It is still not clear as to what the number it is now, but that is however well behind the previous projection of Amazon that it would complete 10,000 deliveries to customers via drone by the end of the year 2023.
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