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\nTexas is fast becoming the leading US hub for food and store package deliveries via drone.<\/p>\n
\nTexas is fast becoming the leading US hub for food and store package deliveries via drone.<\/p>\n
Flytrex and Causey Aviation, which received Part 135 certification from the FAA to begin remote drone deliveries later this year, recently established its headquarters in Granbury, Texas, a small suburb just south of Dallas-Ft. Worth.<\/p>\n
The two companies have partnered with a number of prominent restaurant chains \u2013 including Chili\u2019s and Maggiano\u2019s \u2013 owned by Brinker\u2019s International.\u00a0 Granbury residents can order food items off the menus of the two restaurants and have them delivered to their door in less than an hour.<\/p>\n
Two other companies \u2013 Wing, a subsidiary of Google\u2019s parent company. Alphabet, and Drone-Up, the drone delivery partner of Walmart \u2013 are also conducting remote aerial deliveries in the Lone Star State, each of them, like Flytrx, on the outskirts of\u00a0 Dallas-Fort Worth.\u00a0 Indeed, all three companies are operating within a stone\u2019s throw of each other by aviation standards, making them head-to-head competitors.<\/p>\n
Wing\u2019s Texas operations began almost a year ago \u2013 in September 2022 \u2013 as a partnership with Walgreens.\u00a0 Residents of two small suburbs, Frisco and Little Elm \u2013 in this case, just north of Dallas-Ft. Worth \u2013 can order select items from a handful of Walgreens stores that also serve as the hangar for Wing\u2019s delivery drones.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Walmart and Drone-Up, which began their drone operations about 9 months ago \u2013 in December 2022 \u2013 are operating just a little further up the road at 11 Walmart store outlets in a handful of small North Texas cities, including Garland, Mesquite and Plano.<\/p>\n
The FAA, which earlier granted Part 135 certification to Wing (2019) and has endorsed Drone-Up\u2019s partnership with Iris Automation to provide extra safety to its own remote deliveries, has good reason to believe that all three companies will succeed in getting their drone operations off the ground and meeting consumer expectations where others \u2013 like Amazon, which has a drone base in College Station, TX (200 miles further south from Dallas-Ft. Worth, on the outskirts of Austin) \u2013 have largely failed so far.<\/p>\n
Flytrex, like Wing, brings to Texas a successful track record of safe and effective drone performance overseas.\u00a0 The company\u2019s pioneering drone operations in Reykjavik, Iceland, begun back in 2017 with AHA (the country\u2019s version of Amazon), were the first in the world to be conducted in a densely populated urban center.<\/p>\n
Wing, meanwhile, is well-known for its long history of robust deliveries (200,000 total) in towns and cities across Australia, as well as in Finland.\u00a0 And in 2019, Wing conducted the first successful commercial delivery operations in the United States \u2013 in Christiansburg, Virginia \u2013 before most other U.S. drone companies had even commenced their first flight tests.<\/p>\n
Texas is an ideal drone hub for several reasons.\u00a0 One is the state\u2019s flat topography and arid climate, which facilitates drone flights vulnerable to rain and to hilly conditions that often disrupt aerial communications.\u00a0 But Texas is also an important base for the global aerospace and aviation industry, with 15 active military bases, NASA’s world-famous Johnson Space Center, and headquarters for two international airlines as well as two of the world’s busiest airports.<\/p>\n
Consider some of the locations where drone companies are operating: \u00a0Frisco, one of Wing\u2019s new operating sites, has hosted several major tech companies, including Oracle and Redfin, for years.\u00a0 And Plano, one of Walmart\/Drone-Up\u2019s new operating sites, is also home to AT&T\u2019s new 5-G Innovation studio which is testing a variety of 5G-centric applications, including drones.\u00a0 Texas offers tech businesses generous tax incentives and by co-locating with larger tech companies, drone start-ups can find supportive infrastructure and thousands of engineers and technicians just waiting to be hired.<\/p>\n
And consider also Texas\u2019 distinctive pattern of suburbanization.\u00a0 Dallas-Ft.Worth, with a population of 6.5 million people, is a sprawling metroplex with dozens of fast-growing towns and cities in the 150,000 to 250,000 range.\u00a0 These residential areas are large enough \u2013 and affluent enough \u2013 to provide a substantial customer base (unlike isolated rural towns like Amazon\u2019s Lockeford, CA), but still small and dispersed enough to allow for relatively safe overflights.\u00a0 Once drone delivery companies prove themselves in the Dallas-Ft. Worth hinterlands, they\u2019ll be well-positioned \u2013 with improved safety technology and additional FAA regulatory support \u2013 to expand their operations into the core of the metropolis.<\/p>\n
The reputation of the Lone Star State is clearly growing.\u00a0 Manna, Ireland\u2019s world-renowned drone company, has just announced its intent to establish its first US base of operations in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area (close to Wing).\u00a0 The company, which received an infusion of $40 million in investment capital from Coca-Cola\u2019s bottling distributor, is still awaiting FAA approval of its own Part 135 application.\u00a0 If all goes as planned, Manna will commence its first flights \u2013 serving 10,000 customers in a 27,000-acre business and real estate park \u2013 by the end of this year.<\/p>\n
Texas isn\u2019t alone.\u00a0 Other retail delivery hubs are emerging in a handful of other states, especially drone-friendly North Carolina, where Flytex, Wing and another company, Zipline, are conducting their own \u201clast mile\u201d delivery operations.\u00a0 But right now, no drone delivery hub is bigger or more promising than the Lone Star state\u2019s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Texas is fast becoming the leading US hub for food and store package deliveries via drone. Flytrex and Causey Aviation, which received Part 135 certification from the FAA to begin remote drone deliveries later this year, recently established its headquarters in Granbury, Texas, a small suburb just south of Dallas-Ft. Worth. The two companies have… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6642"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dronevideos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}