Uber Eats to Launch Drone Delivery With Zipline

A customer places the order in the app, the restaurant prepares it and loads it into Zipline's autonomous system, and the flight is handled by the Platform 2 aircraft, an electric drone that carries up to eight pounds within a ten-mile radius. According to the company, it cruises at roughly 70 miles per hour and can complete some ten-mile trips in about ten minutes. Rather than landing, the aircraft hovers near 300 feet while a smaller unit descends on a tether, steers toward the chosen spot and sets the order on the ground, a sequence Zipline says takes around 90 seconds. The partnership builds on an existing network: Zipline reports more than 2.7 million commercial deliveries and 135 million autonomous miles flown, with Walmart and restaurant partners already served in Pea Ridge, Arkansas, and more than 20 communities around Dallas-Fort Worth. Uber, meanwhile, has been assembling several delivery methods at once, adding sidewalk robots in some markets and investing in the drone firm Flytrex in 2025.

Regulation and public tolerance will shape how quickly the service spreads. Zipline has secured approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for certain beyond-visual-line-of-sight flights, which permit routes without ground observers watching the aircraft, and says it tested the platform through tens of millions of simulated flights and more than 150,000 deliveries at test facilities. Noise remains an open question, since occasional flights are easier to ignore than constant ones. Cost is another: neither company has said whether customers will pay extra for the option. Zipline, which raised more than $600 million at a valuation of $7.6 billion, will need far more aircraft and participating businesses to approach its 2029 target.