The Dallas Flyer: Episode 3

This post was originally part of our Dallas Flyer email newsletter. You can read other entries here or subscribe to receive future email updates here.

from: Jacob <howdy@wing.com>

to: Wing Early Flyers

date: November 4, 2021

subject: Our Drone, Bigger'n Dallas

We’re officially off to a flying start in Little Elm and Frisco! So far, we’ve completed 15 practice flights. These cover short distances and are primarily to train support staff and make sure everything is operating as expected.

Here’s one of our first flights from Frisco Station:

To mark the occasion, we thought this would be a good time to take a look at what’s flying through that Texas sky.

Our drone is designed and engineered for suburban and urban delivery. Although we operate different variations of this drone depending on where we’re flying — partly due to weather variations, partly due to differences in regulation — they all operate in fundamentally the same way.

Unlike the hobbyist drones you’re used to seeing, our drone combines features of both a multi-rotor and a fixed-wing aircraft. Twelve hover rotors get us up in the air like a helicopter, and 2 or more forward propellers allow us to fly like a traditional airplane to get where we need to go. It’s the best of both worlds. Our drone flies 150 feet above the ground with a cruising speed around 65 mph; and we can deliver to picnic-blanket-sized spots within a 6-mile radius of a drone staging area, as long as there are no trees or obstacles directly overhead. We can get from our facility to your home in just a few minutes. Typically, total delivery times are under 10 minutes (our fastest delivery ever: 2 minutes and 47 seconds from order to touchdown).

Of course, speed isn’t everything. Our drone also has a number of safety features implicit in the design. There are a lot of built in backups — multiple propellers, multiple control surfaces (those are the flaps) — redundancies that help ensure if one component fails, there will be another to pick up the slack. Our drones are constructed largely from foam, and weigh under 11 pounds unloaded.

We have pilots who oversee every flight, similar to the way air traffic controllers watch icons on a map. These pilots do not have access to any images captured by our drones, and in fact there is no live stream of footage to anyone, anywhere. 

Want an in-person look at our drone? Come on down to the Frisco Rotary Farmers Market from 8 a.m. to noon this Saturday (Oct. 23). Come say hi and snag a selfie with the aircraft. (And no, sorry, we can't let you fly it. Heck, they won’t even let us fly it. Our drone flies itself!)