Drone delivery is heading to more US neighborhoods
(12 Aug 2025) FOR CLEAN VERSION SEE STORY NUMBER: 4596218 ASSOCIATED PRESS Frisco, Texas – 07 August 2025 1. Various of DoorDash Drone delivery to customers house 2. Various of DoorDash Drone customer opening box 3. SOUNDBITE (English) Janet Toth, DoorDash customer : “It's convenient, it's fast, it is quick and easy.” 4. SOUNDBITE (English) Janet Toth, DoorDash customer : “Especially when you have busy streets around you and traffic congestion, especially after school, because all the parents are at a school picking up their kids and just getting out of that line is always a terror. And of course, that means a congestion.” 5. Various of DoorDash Drone nest area with workers sending packages off ASSOCIATED PRESS Lewiston, Maine – 07 August 2025 6. SOUNDBITE (English) Adam Woodworth, Wing CEO : ++ZOOM - QUALITY AS INCOMING++ ++ COVERED++ “Where we keep all the planes we call a nest. It's basically a fence line with some little pads inside that the planes charge on and a connection to the internet.” 7. SOUNDBITE (English) Adam Woodworth, Wing CEO : ++ZOOM - QUALITY AS INCOMING++ ++PARTIALLY COVERED+++ “We've been really focused on like, how do we build a great service for sort of that like large suburban sprawl.” ASSOCIATED PRESS Frisco, Texas – 07 August 2025 8. Various of DoorDash Drone nest area with workers sending packages off ASSOCIATED PRESS Lewiston, Maine – 07 August 2025 9. SOUNDBITE (English) Adam Woodworth, Wing CEO : ++ZOOM - QUALITY AS INCOMING++ ++ PARTIALLY COVERED++ “If you look at sort of like the density of merchants that you would partner with, the need where you have like, okay, there's still relatively long distances and like it's not in the city, but there's still traffic. Like there's a nice sweet spot there for that. And for us, it's like we can build a very successful business addressing that sort of segment.” ASSOCIATED PRESS Frisco, Texas – 07 August 2025 10. Drone video of DoorDash drone conducting home delivery STORYLINE: Drone delivery is so fast it can zip a pint of ice cream from Walmart to a customer’s driveway before it melts. Yet drone delivery has also been slow to take off in the U.S. More than five years after commercial drone delivery began, it’s still found in only a handful of suburbs, and deliveries are made within a limited radius. That could soon change. This month, the Federal Aviation Administration proposed a new rule that would make it easier for companies to use drones over longer distances out of the operator’s sight. Some companies do that now, but they had to obtain a waiver from the government, which is a cumbersome process. At the same time, companies that have been testing drone delivery will soon make it available to millions more U.S. households. Walmart and Wing, a drone company owned by Google parent Alphabet, currently provide delivery from 18 Walmart stores in the Dallas area. By next summer, that will expand to 100 Walmart stores in Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando and Tampa. DoorDash recently announced an expansion into Charlotte after several years of testing in rural Virginia and Dallas. Zipline, which works with Walmart in Arkansas and Dallas, will soon expand to Seattle. Amazon launched Prime Air drone delivery in suburban Phoenix late last year and plans to expand to Dallas, San Antonio and Kansas City. Wing CEO Adam Woodworth said drone delivery has been in “treading water mode” for years, afraid to scale up because the regulatory framework wasn’t in place. “It really does seem like part of everyday life,” Shih said. Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter: / ap_archive Facebook: / aparchives Instagram: / apnews You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...
