Liam O’Connor – ZiplineDrones in the U.S. are now allowed to make long-range deliveries without someone watching from the ground. This is a landmark step towards bringing people universal, on-demand access to the products they need.In 2012, Congress ruled that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) needed to safely integrate autonomous commercial drones into the U.S. airspace to ensure economic competitiveness. On September 18, the FAA announced a landmark decision that meaningfully delivers on this vision. For more than a decade, even the most advanced long-range drone deliveries in the U.S. required visual observers, stationed on the ground along a route, to watch the sky during the delivery. The FAA has now authorized Zipline to make commercial deliveries beyond visual line of sight without visual observers. Zipline has long worked hand-in-hand with the FAA on our groundbreaking technology that enables safe deconfliction with other air traffic participants. Our onboard perception safety system has been tested and proven to enable continuous, real-time airspace monitoring — one of the capabilities Congress identified as necessary for commercial drone deliveries to safely scale. This system has been tested by flying tens of thousands of real-world miles around the globe and through tens of thousands of test encounters with aircraft. It has been designed to operate with the highest level of safety regardless of visual observers along flight routes. This exemption from the FAA represents a monumental shift for logistics and equitable access in the U.S. It builds the foundation for Zipline to scale to deliver food, medicine, consumer goods and other supplies to millions of Americans on-demand, and to do so in an environmentally conscious way, resulting in 97% fewer emissions per delivery than a gas-powered vehicle. Zipline can now have the kind of positive impact in the U.S. that we’ve had in other countries where we can fly more than 140 miles round trip, beyond the visual line of sight of any observer, all day every day. We have flown over 50 million commercial autonomous miles around the world, carrying everything from blood, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, educational materials, food, and convenience items to tens of millions of people. For example, our deliveries have brought education supplies to children in Ghana who live in areas cut off by flooding, and blood, on-demand, to doctors in Rwanda performing life-saving surgeries.These may seem like extreme examples, but people in the U.S. have also normalized systemic supply chain issues — such as living in food deserts or settling for slow turnaround times for medical tests — that affect their quality of life. We are already working with U.S. partners now to deliver pharmaceutical supplies directly to patients’ homes, help businesses bring customers fresh food, and quickly transport temperature-sensitive lab samples for faster diagnoses. This decision will improve millions of American lives. We applaud the FAA for making it possible, and enabling such a powerful change on the horizon.
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