Hindsight is 2020: Five Lessons from a Year Unlike Any Other

While COVID made the benefit of contactless delivery obvious, it also highlighted other benefits of drone delivery that will outlive the pandemic. 

At a time when limiting close contact with other people became important, the use of our delivery service grew 500% in 2020 over 2019.  And while much of that growth initially occurred when people began to stay home during the pandemic, use of our delivery services remained well above pre-COVID levels through the end of the year. Even in Australia, where infection rates in our service areas declined to zero and schools and businesses reopened, we continued to see drone delivery remain a bigger part of everyday life. 

The local businesses we worked with told us that drone delivery became one of the few ways they could reach customers. Mockingbird Cafe, a Virginia bakery, told us drone delivery accounted for about 25 percent of total sales during the early days of the pandemic.  In Logan, Australia, Extraction Artisan Coffee was able to keep baristas working during the pandemic by delivering their coffees with Wing.

We’ve just scratched the surface on all the uses for this technology, and communities are teaching us new ones all the time.

Never was this more clear than in Virginia this summer, when a local librarian approached us with the idea to use drones to deliver library books to local students while the schools were closed due to the pandemic. If we’re being honest, this idea had not occurred to us, but we thought we would give it a try. On the first day we launched the drone delivery library service in June, we delivered well over a dozen books to local students -- today, the library deliveries are one of our most popular offerings in Virginia.

Meanwhile, in Australia, tradespeople make 60 million unplanned trips to the store to collect hardware items or tools they don’t have on site. For “tradies”, that equates to lost time for 1 in every 3 construction projects (read more here). Wing is now exploring how, by replacing a share of these trips, drone delivery could save time and money for both households and the construction and maintenance industry. Wing is already partnered with Browns Plains Hardware in Logan, Australia, and we look forward to continuing to explore ways drone delivery could improve efficiency at worksites.

And finally, apart from being our oldest and largest operational deployment, Australia was also the home of our most interesting application in 2020. In Canberra, locals were able to keep a national tradition known as the “democracy sausage” alive, delivering “sausage sizzles” by drone on election day.

Around the world, the drone industry and aviation regulators quietly made significant progress on drone traffic management.

COVID-oriented delivery and relief efforts generated most of the drone headlines in 2020, but industry and regulators quietly made some significant progress on Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) as well, particularly in Europe. UTM will be absolutely critical to allow drones to safely share the sky with each other, and other aircraft. The benefits that commercial drone applications promise at scale won’t be realized without it.

Wing worked with aviation authorities and industry partners to advance UTM from theory to practice in 2020, contributing to the development of UTM systems in France and the United Kingdom. We participated in efforts to demonstrate UTM services, like remote identification, in the United States and Switzerland and participated in standards-making bodies like ASTM International to enable a globally harmonized approach to drone integration. In November, we demonstrated strategic deconfliction and remote identification of drones in the FAA’s UTM Pilot Program. The completion of this program was a big step toward showing that capabilities to support drone integration in the United States are production-ready today.