Drone Delivery, Downtown

Wing’s progress can be charted along the increasingly dense environments in which we’ve been able to operate: from rural farms to lightly populated suburbs to more dense suburbs to large metropolitan areas like Brisbane, Australia, Helsinki, Finland, and the Dallas Fort Worth metro area in Texas.

Despite days when we’ve delivered nearly 1,000 packages a day –around one every 30 seconds–in one of Australia’s fastest growing metro areas, we still get the question: is drone delivery really feasible for dense, urban environments? It is, but to show just how feasible, we decided to take drone delivery to one of the more challenging environments we could imagine: a professional sports stadium in the middle of one of America’s fastest-growing cities.

Earlier this month, we did a demonstration delivery at Coors Field – home of the Colorado Rockies – delivering beer (Coors of course) and peanuts to the field. Admittedly, it wasn’t on a game day, but there were approximately 1,000 people in the stands enjoying the kickoff party for AUVSI’s annual autonomous systems conference.

We chose Coors Field because it’s a particularly challenging environment. Coors Field sits in the middle of Denver, Colorado – one of the fastest growing cities in America. Any professional sports stadium – with stadium seating, jumbotrons, and the like – makes for a fun challenge. And at 5,200 feet, Coors Field sits a “mile high” in North America’s second tallest city. 

Our intent here is not to deliver beer and peanuts to stadium-goers. Our drones will never match the experience of flagging down a vendor and having them toss peanuts to you from 20 seats away. Nor do we think delivering during game day is a particularly compelling use-case for our technology. We’re more focused on supplementing existing methods of ground-based delivery to move small packages more efficiently across miles, not feet. 

But as we prepare to expand the potential reach of our drone delivery service with our Wing Delivery Network operating model, we want to show just how ready the technology is to deliver in more places. So to all those who still wonder if this technology will ever be ready for urban, downtown environments: the Denver skyline in the background is one more image that says, “Wing was here.”