The U.S. e-commerce giant Amazon promised to launch drone delivery in 2019, but Ukraine’s delivery service Nova Poshta beat them to it.
On July 29, the company delivered four parcels from Kyiv to Kharkiv using a drone manufactured by the Ukrainian startup AeroDrone.
It took AeroDrone nearly five hours, from 7 a.m. to 12 p.m., to fly 480 kilometers at an altitude of 300 meters above the ground. To compare, passenger aircrafts usually fly at an altitude of 10,000 meters above the ground.
Given that it was Nova Poshta’s first drone delivery, the company accompanied the parcel with an aircraft.
Nova Poshta claims to have set the world’s record. “No other logistics company has dared to do (a delivery by drone),” said the company’s CEO Alexander Bulba.
Globally, many delivery companies, including Amazon in the U.S. or Royal Mail in the U.K., envision a future where drones will be able to deliver parcels within a few hours and drop them on customers’ doorsteps. Nova Poshta aims to cut the delivery time down by three hours and make drone delivery available to all customers by 2022, according to Bulba.
The company said that in the future many customers will opt for drone delivery just to try it. The next drone with Nova Poshta’s cargo will take off this August in Lviv.
In the air, drones behave like real planes: They can recognize obstacles in their path and have special parachutes helping to land during emergencies. All flights are controlled by an operator, Nova Poshta said.
The delivery drone called Discovery, manufactured by AeroDrone, can carry up to 60 kilograms of cargo and complete 600 kilometers of flight without landing, the CEO of AeroDrone Yuri Pederi told the Kyiv Post. The first four parcels delivered by Discovery mostly included documents, he said. In the future, the number of parcels will depend on their size and weight, Nova Poshta told the Kyiv Post.
Pederi wants to continue working with Nova Posta on drone delivery. “We have a lot of experience in this industry. Most of the other commercial drones on the market are smaller than ours and cannot deliver heavy cargo over long distances,” he said.
Nova Poshta said that in the future, its choice of drone manufacturers will depend on the type of parcel and the distance between cities. The company hasn’t revealed how much it invests in the project. “It’s a trade secret,” the company told the Kyiv Post.
According to Pederi, a projects like this requires significant investment. “But that isn’t the only requirement. It is much more important to have the technology and team of specialists,” he said.
