In March, Zipline released its drone Platform 2, or P2 Zip, which can carry up to eight pounds within a ten-mile radius, handling weights that it says cover most package deliveries in the U.S. With new FAA approval for longer drone flights, the company says it can now also reach millions of Americans.
Zipline
This week, drone delivery company Zipline was granted Federal Aviation Administration approval to fly drones beyond the visual line of sight. That’s a major milestone in efforts to extend the range of the domestic drone industry over U.S. airspace, and Zipline isn’t the only drone operator to recently receive FAA approval.
In a series of moves in August and earlier in September, the FAA gave the same clearance to UPS subsidiary Flight Forward (which delivers packages by drone), avionics provider uAvionix, and drone inspection provider Phoenix Air Unmanned. It’s a regulatory aim that the drone companies have been working towards for a decade and will pave the way for other companies to receive streamlined approval for their own drone flights beyond the visual line of sight. It will also potentially push more consumer companies to accelerate efforts to deliver goods by unmanned aircraft, including giants such as Walmart and Amazon, the latter of which has been viewed as falling behind in its decade-long drone delivery effort.
The FAA told aviation publication Flying that the approvals will serve as the basis for “summary grants” in the future as it continues to work towards formal rulemaking and to help fast track business models similar to the ones to receive the first approvals, meaning package delivery, drone inspections, medical supplies and drone aviation system development, such as uAvionix.
Prior to “beyond the visual line of sight” approval, human observers were required to be stationed along the entire route a drone was flying to ensure that there was no interference with air traffic. The new regulations allow for drones to be flown without observers, which the companies say will increase accessibility and scalability of what’s still a nascent business in the U.S.
“For the last few years, we’ve been operating in the U.S. with training wheels,” said Zipline CEO Keller Cliffton. “We were able to make deliveries to homes but we always needed to stay within a mile-and-a-half of our distribution centers, which made it easy to serve tens of thousands of people, but impossible to serve hundreds of thousands of people.”
Now he says Zipline will be…
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