Uber is officially going airborne. The company just announced its first-ever investment in drone delivery, teaming up with Israeli startup Flytrex to make food orders literally drop out of the sky. Pilot programs are expected to kick off in select US markets before the end of 2025.
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Less than two weeks after completing its acquisition of aerial mobility business Blade, eVTOL air taxi developer Joby Aviation has expanded an ongoing partnership with Uber, Inc. to bring those flights to the popular rideshare app.
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Check out the Uber Eats delivery drone that was showcased during the Forbes 30 under 30 Summit yesterday. The design of this delivery drone looks way more advanced than the one mentioned in the WSJ article from only a few days ago. Instead of being a traditional quadcopter, this drone has six propellers on rotating wings “for increased speed and efficiency” and can land and take off vertically (VTOL).
Natalie Malligan has been announced as Uber Air Australia‘s head, flying Australia forward in Uber Elevate’s passenger drone ambitions. The news comes after Melbourne was added to the list of cities to be first to offer Uber Air flights along with Dallas and Los Angeles.
Uber Air has completed its first high-density urban food delivery by drone in partnership with ModalAI. The collaboration saw Uber Air’s drone successfully fly food from a pick-up location to a pre-determined drop-off location where a courier would be waiting in the case of a real delivery.
With their ride-sharing service, Uber has transformed the way people get from one place to another. Now the company is hoping to revolutionize the way people get their food as well. Last week the company announced plans to start testing the first ever commercial application of food delivery by drone in high-density urban areas in the US. As readers of DroneDJ will know Uber is far from the only company looking to commercialize deliveries by drone. Other competitors in the drone delivery space, of course, are Amazon, Google’s Wing Aviation, UPS, Matternet, and Zipline to name a few.
Uber is looking to hire an operations executive to start delivering food by drone as early as next year according to an article in the Wall Street Journal. According to the since-deleted job listing, the drone executive will “enable safe, legal, efficient and scalable flight operations.” A spokesperson for the San Francisco company said that the posting did “not fully reflect our program, which is still in very early days.” It does indeed seem to be very early as the FAA first has to develop the rules that will allow commercial drone operators to fly beyond visual-line-of-sight and over crowds of people. But, like Amazon, Uber is not afraid to show its ambition.
Yesterday the U.S. Department of Transportation announced the 10 pilot programmes that have been approved under President Trump’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program (UAS IPP) in an effort to bring the country up to speed when it comes to drone experimentation. Yesterday we published the list of awardees and today we are reporting on the companies that made the list such as Airbus, Alphabet (Google), Apple, AT&T, Microsoft, FedEx, Uber, and others. As well as the ones that did not make the list, most notably Amazon and DJI.
Uber and Bell Helicopter are showing off a four-passenger taxi drone simulator at CES this year. The drone is meant to fly people from A to B on fixed routes, for instance from a train station or parking garage to an airport. The drone can be flown manually by a pilot or it can fly itself. Neither Uber or Bell offered any details on the propulsion system, unfortunately. We do know however that it has VTOL capability, i.e. vertical take-off and landing.
Silicon Valley drone company, Zipline has teamed up with the Rwandan health ministry to deliver blood and other urgently needed medical supplies to hospitals around the country much faster than before. Blood deliveries by drone have reduced the time it takes to get blood to where it is needed, from four hours on average to half an hour. The Zipline delivery drones can fly up to 65 mph and have a 47-mile service radius. Over the last year, the drones have completed over 5,500 units of blood, often in life-saving situations to 12 regional hospitals. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles has helped to reduce maternal deaths, a quarter of which are the result of blood loss during childbirth.