Drone logistics
Moving goods by autonomous aircraft over the last mile — bypassing roads by flying packages directly to a recipient.
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A drone logistics system replaces a van and a driver with a small aircraft that lifts off, navigates to a GPS coordinate, and deposits a package — usually at the doorstep or a designated drop zone. The appeal is the last mile: the segment of delivery that accounts for a disproportionate share of cost and time, because roads are congested and addresses are spread out. The hard part is airspace: drones share sky with manned aircraft, so safe operation requires reliable collision avoidance, weather tolerance, and a regulatory framework that does not yet exist at scale in most countries.
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145 million miles, no burial
Zipline says its delivery drones have now flown about 145 million autonomous commercial miles without a serious-injury incident — a record no competitor is close to, on roughly the mileage where ground vehicles would bury someone.
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