Finally, There’s a Halfway Compelling Consumer Drone Delivery Service

So far, trials of delivery drones for everyday folks have been rather more hype than substance, but a new service in Iceland may change that.

Drone delivery firm Flytrex today announces that it is providing a new service for the Icelandic e-commerce company AHA. Its drones will be used to make deliveries of packages weighing up to 6.5 pounds from AHA’s HQ in Reykjavik to a patch of land 2 miles across a bay. It will complete 20 deliveries per day initially, with that number planned to rise to over 100 soon. It takes 4 minutes for the drone to cross the bay, which is over 20 minutes faster than driving the same route in traffic. So far it’s delivered items ranging from sushi to waffle makers.

The firm has permission from Icelandic Transport Authority to fly the drones along a route out of line-of-sight, and a controller is alerted to emergencies where another aircraft may get in the way in order to prevent collisions. Currently, customers will have to pick up deliveries from a designated drop-off zone, or have them delivered the last few hundred yards by AHA staff. But cofounder of Flytrex, Yariv Bash, tells the Download that the firm is just “weeks or months” off being allowed by the ITA to make deliveries to backyards of AHA customers. He says that will make delivery costs “an order of magnitude less” than conventional deliveries by van. Flytrex will hand the system over to AHA in a few weeks, so the retailer will control the deliveries itself.

The volume of drop-offs, hand-off of the technology, and impending possibility of backyard deliveries sets the scheme apart from other consumer drone delivery trials—such as Amazon’s very experimental tests the U.K., which so far only serve two paying customers that live on the opposite side of a field to the experiment’s base. Elsewhere, the most notable drone delivery service is being developed by Zipline in Rwanda, where winged aircraft carry medical supplies to remote health centers.

There are, of course, many barriers to widespread drone delivery. Shipping small products over short distances is fine, but improvements must be made to performance and battery life if people are going to receive anything larger than a waffle maker through the air. And while Flytrex may have overcome regulatory issues in Iceland, it remains a thorny problem elsewhere, especially in America.

Still, Bash thinks we’ll all soon become converts. “A hundred years ago we didn’t have cars or scooters, but once you’ve learned that driving a Model T [Ford] is better than horseback riding, you realize the benefits,” he says. “Once you realize that you can receive orders in 15 minutes instead of waiting for next-day delivery and it’s going to cost you the same price, you won’t look back.”