Google Wing flies ahead

“[This means that people] are spending a lot of time in traffic where the road infrastructure hasn’t caught up, and the public transport infrastructure hasn’t caught up to the growth, potential growth there.

“So, if you’re getting something delivered in Logan, that time is huge. If it takes you 15 minutes, even round trip, to get to the store to buy a loaf of bread to make school lunch during rush hour, and you’re fighting for a parking space, and you’re already late for work in a drive that’s probably going to be delayed due to traffic, that time [saved], that’s how we look at it.”

Wing isn’t the first company to attempt drone delivery, but its past competitors suffered turbulence and crashed in both a figurative and literal sense. So how as Wing succeeded where others have failed?

Whilst there is an initial novelty to have a miniature flying contraption drop off your lunch, coffee or last-minute groceries in a Jetsons-style fashion, the service quickly became the norm. A big part of that was where the company chose to launch its drone delivery, such as Logan, and now parts of Canberra and the Gold Coast.

“We also like going to cities where they have a vision for this.”

The COVID-19 pandemic proved to provide an additional use case for Wing — true contactless delivery.

“All of a sudden, delivery with no human contact had new meaning during COVID-19. But now people start to expect that, and that last mile delivery growth has surged certainly because of delivery by drone, but across really all last mile mediums. And in Logan it is this subset of people due to their growth and their location that that really find the service helpful.”
Customers were able to order COVID-19 testing kits, or food and groceries while in isolation, cementing the service as regular routine.

In addition, Wing’s drones are held accountable by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA), the same governing body that regulates airlines such as Qantas, meaning standards on safety are high.

“We really take safety paramount, and that goes across the teams,” says Suskin.

“Whether it’s our hardware engineers who are building the aircraft, the software engineers who are working on the UTM software that plans routing, or even teams that aren’t involved in software or hardware, everybody, by putting safety in mind, knows we’re putting our front foot forward on something that is extremely safe. That is something that [the] community will expect, especially when it comes to aviation.”

Educating the public has also been paramount in increasing the service’s penetration rate, although the process of talking to communities in an extremely manual way, particularly for a company owned by Google, that prides itself on its automation has been a challenge for Wing.

“It’s interesting when you have teams going out and doing pop up stalls in the community to explain the service,” says Suskin.

“Our whole company gets involved in that process, which is exciting. When schools want to know about how this works, we have some of the world’s best engineers working on this, we’ll put them in the local school where the drones are flying to explain it right.

It’s been a fun process, but it’s a very manual process too, and it takes time. But that’s okay. We’re in this for the long haul. We want to make sure the communities we’re operating in love having the service.”

Wing has been operating in Logan for several years, as well as other parts of south-east Queensland, Canberra and in specific parts of the US and Finland.

Growth has been fantastic but seeing how the service will work in a city environment such as the Sydney or Brisbane CBD where the airspace is more populated, people are more densely packed, and obstacles such as skyscrapers provide a threat will be a major step up for the company.

In reference to the drone delivery moving into city environments, Suskin says that Wing is “probably some way to that, and that is okay.

“I truly think, just looking at our customer behavior and what merchants are looking for us to do, the problem we’re solving with the aircraft for flying and the solutions we have today are really beneficial, and I think we’ll keep growing in that sense, by going to [places such as] Ormeau on the Gold Coast.

“The Gold Coast is I think the sixth largest city in Australia and granted, we’re not in the CBD, right in the heart of that. But it’s a great way to introduce these larger cities to this concept.

“Before we talk about the technical — can the drone navigate in between buildings — actually, probably is the correct answer, without having done that. The technology probably isn’t even the more difficult part to solve.

“I just know what we’re really good at solving for, you know, we’re, although we’ve been here for years, it’s such a new industry in concept.”

In an interesting way, automated drone delivery helps keep brick and mortar services alive in conjunction with online ordering, as stores and their staff pack order for the drones to then pick up and deliver.

With growth of the services doing as well as it is, major retailers such as Coles have partnered with Wing to deliver groceries.

Discussing the process of a retailer being compatible for the drone delivery service, Suskin explains that the required infrastructure is quite minimal.

“The drones always have to take off and land from somewhere, and the instance of Coles in Ormeau, the drones are located at that store.

“Our drones are very lightweight, they weigh five kilograms and are made of Styrofoam, they don’t use a lot of energy.

“If you have pasta delivered from Coles, you will use more energy to boil the water to cook the pasta than the drone will use to fly.

“When I say infrastructure, I don’t mean major power plants, they’re so light, it’s really just a safe space for them to take off and land and to be in close proximity to the items we’re delivering.”

“We have a few different partnerships, and Coles is a great example. Globally, a third of what we deliver is grocery so it’s a great match. If you just think about how, you live your most people go, they do a big weekly shop, and then they run in and out for little things in between.”

“At our location in Grand Plaza, which is a vicinity centre, the drones sit on the rooftop of that centre. And then we deliver for the merchants in that centre as an example.

“There are different ways we work with companies. Usually it’s just aligning, really, drones can take off and land. Or do they really see a need or have a product subset that works?”

So, what does the immediate future look like for Wing? How can a company that continues to break the mould in so many ways, continue to do so?

“Now that we’ve been in Australia for a few years, we do hope to bring this to more people, I think it will look similar to how we’ve been operating, [whether it] be going to really fast-growing cities or densely populated, urban, but suburban areas, just on the fringes of larger cities, I think that model works,” says Suskin.

“I think the Gold Coast that we announced, we just started as a great example of that, where we’re going to keep looking at bigger cities that that we can supply in, we can introduce this concept to more people and get them excited about it and things like that.

“Coming up, I’d say to be honest, we will very shortly have even more announcements about our work in Australia. So, stay tuned.

“But some of the things we’re even announcing very shortly are exciting and a bit more different than how we’ve operated previously. For us, it’s constantly iterating to deliver a product and a service that people want. And I think the next phase is what we’re looking at is going to be great.”