Fe a tu r e
Privatising the Drone Sky Delivery Promises Comfort and Speed but at a Cost to Workers and Communities Drone delivery company Wing recently celebrated 100,000 deliveries with an unusual burst of media fanfare. Australia is at the forefront of Wing’s plans, with the company’s two biggest trial sites running in Canberra and Logan in Queensland. Wing tells a simple story of barista coffee and roast chooks dropped on your driveway at a moment’s notice. Short on Vegemite for the kids’ brekky? Hop on the app, order, and a drone will lower a new jar to your doorstep before the toast is cool. All quick, contactless, and COVID-safe. But the real story is much more complex. Drone delivery at scale will transform the skies, change expectations for speedy delivery, and hide the labour that makes it possible. Owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, Wing has huge resources. New drone regulations are already being written, and Wing is setting itself up to be the backbone of a new aerial infrastructure.
How Wing works Wing operates much like many app delivery platforms. After signing up, customers use the smartphone app to place their orders. Orders are then packed at local base stations and flown to their destinations by Wing’s drones. On arrival, the packages are lowered to customers by winch, automatically detaching from the drone before it returns to the base station. Unlike the hobby drones you might see above parks and beaches, Wing’s delivery drones can operate out of the operator’s line of sight. Flight is fully autonomous, with one pilot monitoring several flights at once and able to take over or land if necessary. How that will scale up in volume and frequency isn’t clear. So far, the trial sites in Canberra and Logan offer clear and uncomplicated airspace and a flat, regular urban environment.
Wings launches delivery service in Canberra and Logan City Queensland. Alphabet.
For customers, all this promises a swift, seamless and contactless experience. Deloitte’s economic modelling on the drone industry in Australia notes that drones enable further automation of work. But behind every promise of “autonomous” or “automated” technology are hidden human workers.
Whose labour does it save? One of Wing’s major promises is unbelievably fast delivery on demand. Wing boasts an average delivery time of roughly 10 minutes. Their quickest time recorded – from order placement to product in hand – is 2 minutes and 47 seconds. This is a remarkable acceleration in the pace and expectation of delivery. Ordinary mail might take days or weeks, but thanks to the “Amazon effect” private delivery services have already shifted expectations from nextday to same-day and now even one or two hours. While Wing’s drones are autonomous, the service still relies
on human labour. Pilots monitor flight paths, packers parcel up the products, and maintenance staff take care of the hardware and software. All of these workers must perform to satisfy the 10 minute delivery time. Amazon warehouses and food delivery apps have shown us how such punishing timelines can be dangerous for worker safety and devastating for morale. For precariously employed or gig economy workers, missing targets can mean instant termination. And the repercussions of 10-minute delivery may spread beyond Wing. If consumer expectations change, rival delivery companies (who may not be using automated drones) will feel pressure to keep pace. Deloitte modelling from 2020 suggests drone delivery could cost less than half the current rate of an e-bike delivery. In the Canberra trial, some products at least are delivered for the same as in-store prices. How those delivery costs will be distributed between Wing, businesses, workers and customers once the pilot programs are over, however, is unclear — but if the likes of UberEats are anything to go 35
