Commercial drone delivery officially kicked off in the US recently when the Federal Aviation Administration approved UPS’s unlimited flying freight initiative.
Flying freight has for long been the dream of United States’ courier services like UPS and big box retailers like Amazon who will stop at nothing to reach customers.
These companies have been calling in drone experts and working with them to engineer drones powerful enough to deliver packages to customers. Most companies eyeing flying freight have been doing field trials and experimenting with short deliveries to see the capability of their innovations and strategies.
And after all efforts to come up with the effective commercial delivery drones, the FAA has finally allowed the UPS to offer unlimited drone delivery. UPS went public with inspiring news of FAA’s official approval of its full commercial drone airline which will now enable it to grow its present small flying freight service to a nation-wide network.
During the announcement, the postal service also mentioned that it will begin by planning drone delivery services particularly for hospital grounds all over the US, and then prepare similar solutions for other industries.
UPS is proud to be the first full commercial drone delivery service thanks to its close association with the supervisory body during its developmental and experimental stages.
Soon after its approval, UPS also became the number one commercial flight service to deliver packages by drone to a real paying consumer outside-of-line-of-sight owing to an exemption it received from the authorities.
Unlimited delivery, Unrestricted Weight and Delivery at Night
UPS also became the first to receive FAA’s topmost level of certification—the Part 135 standard. The Flight Forward certification allows UPS to make unlimited drone deliveries with an unlimited number of remote operators in control. This kind of unrestricted delivery will allow UPS to measure and improve its services to satisfy customer needs.
For the first time again, FAA’s Part 135 has enabled UPS to fly more than 55 pounds of drone & freight and also deliver at night unlike before.
Wrapping Up
Unlimited commercial drone delivery has come sooner than the US expected thanks to UPS’s effort and we expect Amazon to follow suit soon.
Hopefully flying freight will change the future of product delivery and grow despite the challenges critics predict.
Author bio: Michael Hollis is a Detroit native who now lives in Los Angeles. He is an account executive who has helped hundreds of business owners with their high risk business loans.
He’s experimented with various occupations: computer programming, dog-training, scientificating… But his favorite job is the one he’s now doing full time — providing
business funding for hard working business owners across the country.
