Zipline: “Making Aviation History,” FAA Enables Drone Delivery At Scale

Lead­ing drone deliv­ery com­pa­ny, Zipline, is back in the news again describ­ing its lat­est achieve­ment as “Mak­ing Avi­a­tion His­to­ry”, reports a press release. On Mon­day (Sep­tem­ber 18th), the FAA announced it is autho­ris­ing Zipline, Beyond Visu­al Line of Sight (BVLOS) com­mer­cial oper­a­tions around the U.S cities of Salt Lake City and Ben­tonville, Arkansas. Zipline is a FAA-cer­tifi­cat­ed Part 135 oper­a­tor and will use its Spar­row drone to release the pay­loads via para­chute.

To say this rul­ing is “mak­ing avi­a­tion his­to­ry” is a lit­tle OTT, giv­en that this is the fourth drone com­pa­ny to be giv­en the BVLOS hon­our, but even so, it is anoth­er major step for­ward for the com­pa­ny and the drone deliv­ery indus­try as a whole.

Liam O’Connor, COO of Zipline, empha­sised, “Drones in the U.S are now allowed to make long-range deliv­er­ies with­out some­one watch­ing from the ground. This is a land­mark step towards bring­ing peo­ple uni­ver­sal, on-demand access, to the prod­ucts they need.”

Liam O’Connor

The release explains, “In 2012, U.S Con­gress ruled that the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (FAA) need­ed to safe­ly inte­grate autonomous com­mer­cial drones into the U.S. air­space to ensure eco­nom­ic com­pet­i­tive­ness. On Sep­tem­ber 18, the FAA announced a land­mark deci­sion that mean­ing­ful­ly deliv­ers on this vision.“

And con­tin­ues, “For more than a decade, even the most advanced long-range drone deliv­er­ies in the U.S required visu­al observers, sta­tioned on the ground along a route, to watch the sky dur­ing the deliv­ery. The FAA has now autho­rised Zipline to make com­mer­cial deliv­er­ies with­out that need.”

Mean­while, Zipline has worked hand-in-hand with the FAA on its game-chang­ing tech­nol­o­gy to enable “safe decon­flic­tion with oth­er air traf­fic par­tic­i­pants.” The drone’s “onboard per­cep­tion safe­ty sys­tem” has been tri­alled and proven to enable con­tin­u­ous, real-time air­space mon­i­tor­ing. This is one of the impor­tant capa­bil­i­ties Con­gress iden­ti­fied as nec­es­sary for com­mer­cial drone deliv­er­ies to safe­ly scale. 

This sys­tem has been exhaus­tive­ly test­ed around the world with tens of thou­sands of tri­al encoun­ters with air­craft. It has been designed to oper­ate with the high­est lev­el of safe­ty regard­less of visu­al observers along flight routes. 

(Image Cred­it: DroneXL)

The release states, “This exemp­tion from the FAA builds the foun­da­tion for Zipline to scale to deliv­er food, med­i­cine, con­sumer goods and oth­er sup­plies to mil­lions of Amer­i­cans on-demand, and to do so in an envi­ron­men­tal­ly con­scious way.” 

Zipline points out, “This can now have the kind of pos­i­tive impact in the U.S that we’ve had in oth­er coun­tries (e.g Africa), where we can fly BVLOS more than 140 miles round trip, all day every day. We have flown over 50 mil­lion com­mer­cial glob­al autonomous miles, car­ry­ing every­thing from blood, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, vac­cines, edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als, food, and con­ve­nience items to tens of mil­lions of peo­ple. For exam­ple, our deliv­er­ies have brought edu­ca­tion sup­plies to chil­dren in Ghana who live in areas cut off by flood­ing, and blood, on-demand, to doc­tors in Rwan­da per­form­ing life-sav­ing surg­eries.”

And goes on, “We are already work­ing with U.S part­ners now to deliv­er phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal sup­plies direct­ly to patients’ homes, help busi­ness­es bring cus­tomers fresh food, and quick­ly trans­port tem­per­a­ture-sen­si­tive lab sam­ples for faster diag­noses.” 

Please Read Pre­vi­ous evtolinsights.com Arti­cles About Zipline

U.S: Zipline Drone Deliv­ery Announces Col­lab­o­ra­tion with Health and Well­ness Brand GNC

Watch Video: The Zipline “Game-Chang­er!”

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.flyzipline.com/

https://www.regulations.gov/document/FAA-2020–0499-0033

(Top image: Zipline)