Flying at speeds of up to 110 kilometres per hour, and unencumbered by traffic lights, Wing’s drones – built to the aviation industry’s highest safety and reliability standards – are capable of transporting small packages directly from businesses to customers in minutes. 

The US-based company, owned by Google parent company Alphabet, has completed over 350,000 deliveries across three continents since 2018 with its fleet of lightweight, autonomous delivery drones. 

The vast majority of those deliveries have been in Australia – particularly in South East Queensland, which has become the de facto drone delivery capital of the world. 

Jesse Suskin, Wing’s head of government relations and public policy in Australia, says the company considered a range of factors when deciding to invest in the region. 

“We needed to understand the regulatory environment,” he says. “We wanted to invest in a country with a well-respected aviation regulator that had a high bar for safety, and also a forward-leaning approach for how to safely integrate drones into a busy airspace. After extensive research, we found that Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) fit that description.

“From a state and city perspective, we wanted to operate a service where the state and local governments had a vision for using drones to accomplish last mile delivery, and could serve as a partner to the greater community to help with things like education and outreach, and to ensure the service we were operating was helpful and ultimately successful.”

Since 2019, it’s become increasingly commonplace for residents in Logan and surrounding suburbs to have their morning coffee and lunchtime sushi delivered by drone. Wing’s drones take off from shopping centre loading docks and land on a small clear space on the customer’s property, with no further infrastructure or landing pads required. 

In 2024, the company started delivering into Brisbane City, Australia’s largest LGA. Jesse says the move into Queensland’s capital city is a significant milestone for the company.

“Brisbane is a big step for us,” he says. “We’ve been operating across a number of LGAs in South East Queensland, which has been great, and we’re excited that we’re now at the point where we have the regulatory permissions and the business model in place to start delivering into a city the size of Brisbane.”

Learning to fly

For customers, the benefits of drone delivery are obvious – they can get what they need when they need it, with everything from hot food to essential medical supplies delivered in minutes. 

Wing says their drones can save 35-40 million hours for consumers by 2030 by replacing customer pick-up journeys, with delivery times that are 60-70 per cent faster than road-based methods.

For businesses, Jesse says Wing offers them a way to expand the reach of their business by up to four times as many consumers by bringing more households into range, and to increase customer satisfaction by speeding up the fulfilment process.

At scale, Jesse says the autonomy and low energy consumption of the drones also leads to reduced delivery costs, with savings for businesses of up to $155 million per year by 2030.

“The demand for last-mile delivery keeps growing and growing,” Jesse says. “People are doing more of their shopping online, and they’re using food delivery apps more often. So now you have small packages being delivered all the time by bike, by scooter, by car… the whole landscape of last-mile delivery is rapidly changing. 

“We think drones are a great way to help adapt to that change, without needing major infrastructure overhauls, and without adding more cars to the road, which are busy enough already.” 

Jesse says there’s also a sustainability element to drone delivery, as drones have the potential to reduce emissions by taking cars off the road. 

“Our drones are lightweight – they’re made of styrofoam – and they’re all-electric, so they use very little energy and emit zero pollution,” he says. “For example, if you were to order dried pasta, and it was delivered by drone, you’d use more energy boiling the water to cook that pasta than the drone would use flying it to you. 

“Using a car that weighs a few thousand kilograms to deliver a cheeseburger is like using a city bus to move one person around town. If you can use a zero emissions drone that weighs five kilograms to deliver that cheeseburger, it just makes sense to do that instead.”

While it may be an unusual sight to see delivery drones zipping around an urban environment like Brisbane, Jesse says the company is keen to ensure its technology blends right in. 

“Beyond achieving the appropriate safety-related permissions to fly, we also needed to work with the noise regulator for the appropriate permissions before we began to operate,” he says. 

“In practice, we rarely receive noise complaints, because of a change we made in our aircraft which reduced both the decibel level and the ‘pitch’ of the drone. Our quieter drone generates less noise as compared to the cars and trucks they’re replacing to make deliveries to homes. 

“Our community affairs team also checks in regularly with the city and community stakeholders to ensure we’re operating in a neighbourly way.”