Wing’s UAS Delivery Service Has FAA Certification

April 29, 2019

William Kucinski

Google LLC ’s (Google’s) parent company, Alphabet Inc. (Alphabet), is moving forward with unmanned aircraft system (UAS) or “drone” delivery. Alphabet’s Wing project has become the first UAS delivery service to obtain air carrier certification from the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and will test autonomous commercial air delivery services in southwest Virginia.

The announcement was made after individuals in the test program received lawn-dropped packages from one of Wing’s all-electric, vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) UAS vehicles. The aircraft use a distributed arrangement of 12 rotors and 2 forward-facing propellers to achieve altitudes of up to 400 feet and speeds nearing 75 miles per hour. Wing uses machine learning algorithms to identify doorstep-sized delivery zones that meet an optimal combination of safety and convenience.

William Kucinski is content editor at SAE International, Aerospace Products Group in Warrendale, Pa. Previously, he worked as a writer at the NASA Safety Center in Cleveland, Ohio and was responsible for writing the agency’s System Failure Case Studies. His interests include literally anything that has to do with space, past and present military aircraft, and propulsion technology.

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