Wing touches down in Melbourne

Australian Aviation: You’re now delivering coffee to the city in the world most synonymous with the drink. Tell us more about why you picked Melbourne.

Jesse Suskin: Melbourne marks a really big expansion for our company. We’ve had a significant and growing footprint in South-East Queensland, but this site at the Eastland Centre will be the first in Victoria. Melbourne is exciting for some reasons you alluded to. It’s a foodie town. We’re delivering freshly prepared food and hot coffee. When you look at the demographics and the profile of the eastern suburbs, I think it will be a good fit. There are a lot of similarities to what we’ve seen in Queensland: homes with working parents and a bit of traffic here. The time savings will be great.

AA: How difficult was getting cleared to operate in a new state?

JS: There are similar hurdles, and we need multiple Commonwealth approvals. We still need approval from CASA and the Department of Infrastructure and Transport, mainly regarding noise. We needed to work with the Maroondah council at the LGA, where the centre is, for planning consent. We also worked with the state, not from a regulatory point of view, but by discussing where they thought people would want the service. And you know, the state has been showing signs that they’re interested in emerging aviation technology, so it is a similar process. But Melbourne is also a bigger city with a different airspace and more complex population densities. But now, regulators at every level of government are familiar with our company and drone delivery, so it feels more streamlined.

There are mayors in multiple cities that can now speak to their experience with us. We’ve made hundreds of thousands of flights to Australia. So we’ve shown our regulators that we can do this safely and responsibly.

Our work will make it easier for other operators as well, right? We are flying beyond the visual line of sight. We’re flying over people, and we hope we’ve helped others in the industry. Regulators see the pathway for operations like this, not just for our company but hopefully for the larger ecosystem.

AA: How does Melbourne rank with your sites internationally, given it’s one of the biggest English language-speaking cities in the world?

JS: Well, we just started operations in Ireland, And we have a big footprint in Dallas, Texas. But as an individual site, in terms of the population we can reach and the size of the centre, this is the largest in the world. So, our coverage area in Dallas is pretty wide because we have multiple sites across Dallas, kind of stringing together a larger coverage area. But for any site we operate from, this will have our largest reach.

AA: How much research did you do before picking Melbourne?

JS: We always get this question, right? Why aren’t you delivering to high rises in the middle of the city? My response remains the same: we want to take this service to areas where it could be useful. So it’s not just for convenience but taking traffic off the roads and helping merchants meet their customers differently. And so, yes, we did a lot of research to understand the entirety of Melbourne. What we saw was a lot of characteristics similar to what we have in South-East Queensland.

A lot of single-family homes, a lot of new homes going up, a lot of traffic. A lot of our customers are in this position where they aren’t just right next to the store. The decision they have to make is whether I will get in the car and drive to the centre to get that small item. When people make that decision, we think that’s where we provide the most practical and useful service. And the spillover benefits are one less car running in for a quick trip and then running out. For the city, it’s one less car on the roads and one less usually at a peak hour, right? Because that tends to be when meals are served.

AA: Wing has shifted from its own distribution centres to being placed next to the merchants in shopping malls. Is that where you’ll stay, or could you actually go to individual stores?

JS: For now, this model seems to be working very well. For the merchants it allows so many more merchants to participate, compared to our earlier model, where they were co-located at a Wing facility. In terms of the next evolution, though, Wing does see a world in which we have more and more centres opening up in relative proximity in cities, not next to each other. But you know, there will start to be a network effect. I think there will be a model in which we operate where perhaps a drone takes off from one centre, does a delivery and goes to another to charge or pick up a different package. Or to where a drone takes off from the centre and goes to an adjacent shop a kilometre down the road to do a remote pick up and then carry on.”

If you look at our YouTube page and blog, you’ll see something Wing has developed called an autoloader. It’s essentially a device that securely holds the package so the drone can pick it up. Traditionally, humans do that work, and at a shopping centre, that’s fine because all the drones are taking off and landing from there. But you could see a world where a drone flues a kilometre down the road from the shopping mall to make an additional pickup and then delivers that package.

AA: How far away are we from being able to roll out drone delivery on a grander scale?

JS: This Melbourne site will be a key indication of that. We don’t see Melbourne as a trial, a pilot, or a test. We’re investing, we’re hiring staff there, we’re putting drones there. I have a high degree of confidence this will work well at this centre. I think we’ll also be able to show that drone delivery works across different communities with different demographics. I am hopeful that, sooner rather than later, this scales more easily and rapidly. What I will say about these approvals is, again, they do cover a larger area.

If we decide to open another site, we can streamline that opening more than we had previously. The other interesting thing about our approvals is that we’ve received an update on our pilot-aircraft ratio. Traditionally, we’ve operated under a 1-to-15 permission, so one pilot for 15 aircraft. By demonstrating to CASA the safety and reliability of our systems over the years, we’ve increased that to 1-to-50.