Alphabet’s Wing Expects Drone Network to Deliver Millions of Packages by Mid-2024

Wing is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. that develops a drone delivery system and UTM systems. The company completed their first deliveries in 2014. The company has operations in Australia, the United States, and Finland. The delivery company owned by Google parent Alphabet, expects its drone delivery network will be able to handle millions of deliveries at a lower cost than ground transportation by mid-2024.

Driving this expansion will be the Wing Delivery Network, which CEO Adam Woodworth has said is a decentralized, automated system able to support high-volume delivery activity.

“The network is managed by logistics automation software that constantly allocates hardware resources at a city or metro-wide scale.” - Adam Woodworth(Wing CEO)

Wing’s drones can support curbside pickup and can easily be integrated into retail and restaurant operations, according to Woodworth. The company plans to roll out parts of the network’s capabilities over the next 12 months and demonstrate them in new locations worldwide.

“The economics of drone delivery improve dramatically with scale, and all of the salient metrics (access, safety, and sustainability) become far more meaningful at large volumes,” - Adam Woodworth

If Nucleus were a 3PL this trend may threaten us in time. But because we are a 4PL Supply Chain as a Service provider, we can adjust our network to scale new modes of transport fairly quickly without building in the associated and significant fixed overheads.

Source: Supplychaindive