Uber Eats Will Deliver Food by Drone

A customer places an order in the app, the restaurant prepares the food and loads it into Zipline's automatic system. A Platform 2 aircraft, an electric drone, then carries the order. It can hold eight pounds and fly within ten miles at about 70 miles per hour, so a ten-mile trip takes around ten minutes. The drone does not land. It stays about 300 feet in the air while a smaller unit comes down on a rope, moves to the chosen spot and places the food on the ground. Zipline says this takes about 90 seconds. The company reports more than 2.7 million commercial deliveries and already serves Walmart and restaurants in Arkansas and near Dallas-Fort Worth.

Rules and public opinion will decide how fast the service grows. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has allowed some flights without people on the ground watching the aircraft. Zipline says it ran tens of millions of test flights on computers and more than 150,000 real test deliveries. Noise is still a question: an occasional flight is easier to accept than constant ones. Cost is another, because neither company has said whether customers will pay extra. Zipline has raised more than $600 million and is valued at $7.6 billion, but it will need many more aircraft to reach its 2029 goal.