Wing drones mark two years of deliveries in one Australian town

Wing is a drone company that uses flying drones to deliver packages. The company has announced that September will mark its second anniversary operating in Logan, Australia. Logan is a small town most people outside of Australia have likely never heard of that is a neighbor of Brisbane and home to about 300,000 people.

The residents of Logan are distinctive in that residents of the town have ordered and received over 50,000 deliveries directly to their homes using Wing delivery drones. The city is one of the fastest-growing in Australia, and Wing has announced that it has expanded to serve 19 different suburbs with a combined population of 110,000 additional people. With thousands of on-demand deliveries by drones each week, Logan is said to be the drone delivery capital of the world.

Wing expects to surpass the 100,000 customer delivery mark in the next few days, with more than half of those deliveries made to city residents in the last eight months. With Australia being ravaged by COVID-19 lockdown and wildfires, residents are utilizing the drone delivery service heavily. In the first week of August, Wing recorded nearly 4500 deliveries.

The company says that amount of deliveries works out to a drone delivery almost once every 30 seconds during service hours. Unique aspects of the operation in Logan include that it's live, automated, and on-demand, in addition to the heavy volume of orders received. When the automated system receives an order, the company's software selects the best aircraft available to perform the delivery from among the multiple operation sites.

The system also leverages data about the local environment, including weather and terrain creating a custom optimized path for the aircraft to the exact spot the customer has chosen for delivery either at home or work. Wing plans to expand its service to other similarly sized cities worldwide with populations of under 500,000, including New Orleans, Louisiana, and Manchester, England, and Florence, Italy, among others.