Wing has pulled its drone delivery service from Australia with little fanfare after seven years.
The company, owned by Google parent Alphabet, ended its partnership with DoorDash on January 16, having previously operated from locations including Melbourne’s eastern suburbs and Logan and Ipswich in Queensland; he had already retired from Canberra in 2023.
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“Wing ceased its drone delivery service in Australia earlier this year to focus on increasing demand and scale in the United States,” a spokesperson confirmed to Australian Aviation.
“While Wing no longer offers a delivery service in Australia, the company has recruited staff in the country to support our global operations.”
The company, technically a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, once made more deliveries in Australia than any other country and had dubbed Logan the “drone delivery capital of the world”.
While the spokesperson was unable to confirm recent Australian delivery figures, Australian Aviation understands operations have been busy across Wing’s US network.
The company currently delivers to Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, and Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, St Louis, Tampa and the Bay Area are listed as “coming soon” on its website.
Wing began life in 2012 as one of the first projects in the tech giant’s super-secret research lab, Google X, along with its augmented reality glasses and self-driving cars.
It launched its first tests in 2018 before commencing further commercial flights the following year in both Canberra and Logan.
Delivery initially operated from stores located inside Google’s distribution center, but later moved to picking up packages on the rooftops of shopping centers and then in supermarket parking lots.
Speaking to the Australian Aviation Podcast in 2023, the company’s CEO at the time, Simon Rossi, said Wing was making around 1,000 deliveries a day in Australia.
“Online ordering has more than doubled in the last four or five years since COVID, and we’re riding the wave of that; more online ordering creates more opportunities for drone delivery,” he said.
“They’re safe, they’re fast, they’re affordable, and they’re an environmentally friendly way to do last-mile delivery or on-demand delivery, and when we come back to that, we continue to see different cohorts of people using it.
“I think there are so many benefits to drone delivery and what it can bring that we expect to continue to see increased demand, on top of what we saw through COVID and the contactless wave that we rode.”
A 2024 report for Airservices Australia estimated the country will see 60 million drone flights per year by 2043.
