FAA grants Part 135 certification to Zipline for longest-range commercial drone deliveries in US

Zipline has received the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (FAA) Part 135 air car­ri­er cer­ti­fi­ca­tion to oper­ate in the US and is now autho­rised to com­plete the longest range on-demand com­mer­cial drone deliv­er­ies using uncrewed unmanned air­craft sys­tem (UAS) in the coun­try.

This is the first part 135 cer­ti­fi­ca­tion issued under the FAA’s Beyond pro­gram to safe­ly inte­grate beyond visu­al line of sight (BVLOS) drone oper­a­tions into US air­space.

Zipline designs, man­u­fac­tures and oper­ates what it claims to be the world’s largest auto­mat­ed, on-demand deliv­ery ser­vice, hav­ing flown more than 23 mil­lion autonomous miles, includ­ing BVLOS oper­a­tions, and com­plet­ed more than 325,000 com­mer­cial deliv­er­ies with its elec­tric air­craft.

Zipline cur­rent­ly oper­ates with Wal­mart in the US, Toy­ota Tsusho Cor­po­ra­tion in Japan and at nation­al scale in Rwan­da and Ghana, where it deliv­ered over one mil­lion Covid-19 vac­cines and serves more than 2,000 health care facil­i­ties.

With part 135 cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, the com­pa­ny can sig­nif­i­cant­ly expand its US ser­vice with its part­ners, includ­ing Novant Health, Car­di­nal Health, Inter­moun­tain Health­care, and Mag­el­lan Rx Man­age­ment.

Zipline co-founder & CEO Keller Rin­au­do said: “Our sus­tain­able instant deliv­ery sys­tem is trans­form­ing health­care and retail, and today Zipline makes a deliv­ery every four min­utes.”

Zipline will begin fly­ing routes of up to 26 miles roundtrip, includ­ing through Class D air­space up to 2,500 feet, help­ing reduce con­ges­tion and emis­sions by up to 98 per­cent com­pared with tra­di­tion­al deliv­ery meth­ods.

Ini­tial flights will oper­ate out of Zipline’s hub in Kan­napo­lis, North Car­oli­na, which is capa­ble of serv­ing peo­ple with­in a near­ly 8,000 square mile area and deliv­er­ing half a ton of sup­plies per day.

Zipline is a part­ner of the North Car­oli­na Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion, one of eight pro­grammes select­ed by the FAA to par­tic­i­pate in the Beyond pro­gram.

The com­pa­ny plans to launch deliv­er­ies in Utah with its part­ner Inter­moun­tain Health­care lat­er this year, and expand flights with Wal­mart in Arkansas, which began in Novem­ber under FAA part 107.

Last week, a total of 30 man­u­fac­tur­ers were cho­sen to par­tic­i­pate in the flight test­ing for the Paris Olympics start­ing in July 26th 2024, includ­ing Zipline, Volo­copter, Sky­ports, Thales, Pip­istrel, Air­bus UAM, Lil­i­um, Ver­ti­cal Aero­space, EHang, Ascen­dance Tech­nolo­gies and Joby Avi­a­tion.