RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Drone delivery has reached America's backyards
Zipline's tethered delivery system lowers packages from the sky. Now it has to show that people want the service
With barely a whir of propeller noise, we've got incoming: At the top of a grassy hill, next to a simulated suburban backyard—lawn chairs, a wood play structure, the works—a smooth-cornered white box about the size of a gym bag drops out of the sky. It looks like a pre-CGI special effect because I can see the line—specifically, the one connecting the pod to a drone hovering about 260 feet up, only just visible against the overcast sky. A dinner plate–size rotor at the box's rear spins as the box course-corrects in midair and then sets down on four small gray fins.
The delivery is here. It's a demo, but the same basic system is operating thousands of times a day in Arkansas and across neighborhoods in Texas, where Zipline is flying these drone-and-pod combos to carry a Chipotle burrito bowl or the cat's special food to people's homes.
Keenan Wyrobek, Zipline's chief technology officer, ushers me over to the drone-pod and clicks open its clamshell lid to show off the insulated, carbon-fiber-paneled interior. If we were, say, a local deli, this is how we'd load sandwiches for the drone to deliver. During a drop-off, doors on the bottom would slide open, and whatever the pod was carrying would fall about an inch to the ground. It's meant to be easy, simple and safe. Wyrobek clicks the door shut. Most users get it right.
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Had we blown it, the electric motor would've grunted, and a red light would've flashed. But all is well. We back away, and the pod rises up into the belly of the drone, which flies off. I'm expecting the angry-mosquito noise of a typical quadcopter, but it never comes.
At this testing facility, on a cattle ranch an hour south of San Francisco, Zipline is staging a distinctly old-school kind of future: actual flying robots. "That requires solving a lot of near-edge-of-physics technical problems," says Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, Zipline's CEO. "You need the vehicle to be very aerodynamically efficient to have a meaningful range. You need an energy-dense battery. You need special electric motors designed from scratch to be incredibly light."
That tomorrow may now be in sight. For more than a decade drone delivery has been the tech industry's easiest joke: the demo that never quite became a service. Zipline argues otherwise. Its global network, built largely on its earlier fixed-wing aircraft, has flown more than 130 million autonomous miles and made more than 2.5 million commercial deliveries. And a proposed Federal Aviation Administration rule known as Part 108 could give drone delivery companies a clearer path for flights beyond operators' sight lines. What's being tested in the suburbs is whether the aircraft can be quiet enough to live under, precise enough to find a backyard and safe enough to share neighborhood airspace at scale—and whether anyone wants it.
A decade ago Zipline's drones did a different kind of delivery—moving medical laboratory samples and blood products in Ghana and Rwanda between metropolitan areas and remote clinics. The service used fixed-wing drones, bite-size planes, launched by magnetic slingshot. They dropped their cargo by parachute and were then caught midair by tailhooks and towlines like those on an aircraft carrier.
That service continues to help a lot of people. In Ghana, facilities using Zipline had vaccine "stockouts"—times when no vaccines were in stock—that were 60 percent shorter than those in clinics that didn't work with Zipline. A 2022 review by researchers in Rwanda found blood products delivered by Zipline to mountainous areas arrived more than an hour and a half earlier than those carried by truck, leading to a 67 percent reduction in expiration losses.
For more than a decade drone delivery has been the tech industry's easiest joke: the demo that never quite became a service.
Those slingshot-and-catch drones and parachute drops were made for long-range missions and low-precision delivery to drop zones about the size of two parking spaces. That wouldn't work for delivering food and sundries to North American suburbs, where a delivery has to hit a target about the size of a lounge chair. Though Zipline's aircraft wouldn't need to go as far, they'd need to be far more precise. The company needed a new drone.
A drone's range depends on its batteries, but really, range, weight and carry capacity are all the same problem. Hitting a smaller target means the drone has to hover, but that requires more propellers and more power—especially if the drone is fighting wind or other weather to stay in the same spot. Zipline needed to optimize for cargo. As Wyrobek puts it, "every gram you take out is another gram you can deliver."
The team didn't want a drone to land or even come close to the ground, because it's noisy and less safe. (Zipline's executives showed me TikTok videos of rival delivery drones descending below treetop level, kicking up dirt or dropping boxes into ponds.) The drones could lower deliveries on a tether, as those from Google offshoot Wing do, but the Zipline team worried that a gust of wind could blow the cargo off target.
Zipline landed on an unorthodox solution: put propellers on the delivery box, too. The drone above provides lift, reeling in or unspooling the line, and the pod below maneuvers with thrusters, using two infrared cameras for depth perception and a wide-angle color camera to find its target. "It can tell the difference between nice, flat concrete and nice, flat swimming pool," says Zipline's Zoltan Laszlo, the company's lead for new products and principal engineer.
On lots of drones, small, fast-...
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