The buzzing skies of Woodstock: Walmart drones make it Air Drop City
Drones have been taking soldiers off the battlefields, so it’s fitting that they’d take civilian delivery drivers off the streets.
On Wednesday, Walmart trotted out a drone and pony show in Woodstock to let the public know about its new delivery service in six suburban locations in metro Atlanta. The retail giant will now deliver items weighing up to 2.3 pounds from the sky, lowering them onto your front or backyard via a sturdy string.
Each week, it seems, another event shows us the future has arrived. In this case, it’s airborne, human-free delivery of merchandise, the ultimate step in the just-in-time model of moving inventory.
The range of goods that drones can deliver one day is vast. For instance, they eventually could deliver vital supplies like donated organs to hospitals or life-sustaining drugs to hard-to-reach residents in Appalachia.
On the more mundane level, Walmart currently delivers popular goods that include eggs, nonprescription meds, ice cream and even Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
And why not? When the urge strikes, sometimes you just gotta have it and don’t wanna wander far from the La-Z-Boy.
One could argue it’s just another step in turning the U.S. into a nation of couch potatoes. And one would not necessarily be wrong.
There is a debate concerning the advent of goods dropping from the skies.
On one hand, an item being delivered by a drone is one not being hauled to your home by an Amazon truck, so that’s one trip removed from our crowded highways.
“Some things just don’t make sense, like why use a two-ton car to deliver a two-pound burrito?” James Campbell, a retired professor of supply chain and analytics at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, once told Builtin. “That’s inherently inefficient.”
On the other hand, the skies will increasingly be crowded with unmanned aircraft buzzing like monstrous mosquitoes, bothering residents and occasionally running into stuff.
In the past two months, two Prime Air delivery drones from Amazon struck a crane in Arizona, and another of that company’s drones snapped an internet cable in Texas.
The drones in the Arizona accident reportedly weighed 80 pounds each, much more than the 11-pound craft Walmart is trotting out in metro Atlanta and other states.
For now, that is.
Walmart wants to move to bigger crafts that can carry 5-pound payloads because a 2.3-pound delivery is a quart of ice cream and a couple Snickers bars.
To counter Amazon’s operation, Walmart has partnered with the drone company Wing, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company.
That means you have Goliath duking it out with Goliath, which is the direction business has been heading in the U.S. Both companies are rushing, as Wing exec Heather Rivera put it, to turn drone delivery “from novelty to norm.”
During Walmart’s demonstration, a man in a hard hat hooked up a small package to a hovering drone, a 5-foot-wide contraption that resembles a cross between a catamaran and a B-17 bomber.
The drones, with 16 propellers, can fly 60 mph and will operate up to about 320 feet, a Wing rep said.
The “pilot” is the drone’s software, although one human can oversee 32 of them. The FAA has, in recent years, allowed operation of drones outside the operator’s visual sightlines.
The launching pad is from Walmart’s parking lot. The humans still involved in the process will mostly be employees humping the orders out to the drones as they ready for takeoff.
In August, Tariq Rashid, Wing’s director of operations, told Woodstock City Council members the drones will operate in a four-mile radius from each store and cannot fly within three nautical miles of an airport.
Asked by a council member how many flights a drone can get in its delivery life, Rashid said about 2,000. Deliveries can’t cost a lot, he said, “so the (drone) has to be dead cheap, as cheap as you can get it.”
Nonetheless, the foam and carbon fiber machines have sophisticated tracking, as well as detect-and-avoid technology. He said the drones will abort a delivery mission when flight conditions get iffy and will even do a forced landing if all else fails.
He estimated there were five forced landings in Texas in July out of 30,000 flights.
Shakiba Enayati, an assistant professor and colleague of Campbell’s at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, said drones “have become a same-day, minutes-fast option for commerce.”
As technology has improved, they have become more reliant and efficient, she said, and the number of commercial drones will skyrocket from the current 450,000 or so in the U.S.
Enayati, who largely studies drones and the health industry, said the cost per flight — if maintenance, insurance, technology and machinery costs are taken into account — can range from $2 to more than $10.
Walmart is not charging for drone delivery, no doubt using it as a retail loss leader, trying to get customers hooked on the service.
Enayati said accidents have been relatively rare, especially compared to auto crashes. Most problems, she said, stem from “hobby flights” from amateurs.
Still, as one might expect, a growing number of lawyers are touting their services online for suing drone operators, trying to get in on the ground floor as the technology advances.
So the state of commerce will expand on many fronts.
About the Author
Bill Torpy, who writes about metro Atlanta for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, joined the newspaper in 1990.
