Wing
Autonomous, lightweight delivery drones to transport goods
Wing is an Alphabet company that offers drone delivery. Wing’s fleet of lightweight, highly automated delivery drones transport small packages directly from businesses to homes and between healthcare providers in minutes. While at X, the team developed their technology from the ground up, building a drone capable of flying 20km round trips at 130km/h as well as an unmanned traffic management platform. Today Wing’s highly automated aircraft have completed hundreds of thousands of deliveries across three continents and in multiple major U.S. cities.
The Wing team conducting flight tests in Merced, California, with an early-stage prototype.
The Environmental Costs of Moving Goods
From steamships to railroads, from the Pony Express to modern delivery services like FedEx and DHL, advances in how we move goods from place to place have helped reshape the world. Moving goods around our cities has become harder and costlier. Our networks of roads are heaving under the pressure of increasing traffic congestion, and the growing demand for faster delivery. Whether it’s the parent stuck at home with sick kids and no dinner, or the tradesmen on a site missing a tool, current methods of road transportation are not always fast or efficient enough to solve the problem at hand.
Wing is creating what can become the preferred mode of delivery for the millions of small packages that are delivered every day around the world.
A Wing drone delivering a package in Queanbeyan, Australia in 2017.
Developing Home Delivery
In 2012, the team initially set out to explore how drone delivery could safely and quickly deliver everything from medicine to food. They designed a system that could bring defibrillators to people having a heart attack with the hope that lives could be saved if the devices arrived faster in the air. The team soon learned that integration into emergency medical services was its own huge task — developing safe and reliable drone technology was a challenge unto itself. So, they honed their focus on redesigning the system to transport small packages, across many everyday situations, where the speed of delivery was a significant factor.
Over the next year, the Wing team investigated different approaches to vehicle design, built prototypes, and ran experiments and test flights. The goal was to learn as much as possible, as quickly as possible, to improve the safety systems and precise navigation required to operate in the congested modern world.
The team completed their first real-world deliveries in 2014 in rural Queensland, Australia where they successfully transported a first-aid kit, candy bars, dog treats, and water to farmers. Then in September 2016, the team delivered burritos to students at Virginia Tech in what was, at the time, the largest and longest drone delivery test on U.S. soil. Food was a great early test case for Wing’s technology because it’s fragile and temperature sensitive and therefore needs to be delivered quickly and carefully.
A Wing drone delivery flight containing blood samples for the U.K. National Health Service in London in 2024.
In 2017, the team focused on refining how the delivery drones transport packages directly to suburban yards. They completed hundreds of deliveries to the yards of several homes in the Australian Capital Territory and Queanbeyan regions of Australia. The goal was to determine how to find the best route to a home and how to find a safe delivery spot in the yard. The Wing team is continuously learning how drone delivery is useful in people’s everyday lives by transporting meals, groceries, and medicine.
The Wing Delivery Drone
A sketch of an early prototype.
Essentials in minutes, not hours or days.
Real-time tracking with precision delivery.
Less cars on the road, easing congestion and reducing environmental impact.
Wing Today
Wing graduated from X to become an independent Alphabet business in July 2018. Since then, the team has launched a first-of-its-kind, on-demand service on three continents, delivering everything from medicine and library books, to hot coffees and fresh cookies, and even blood samples in Australia, Europe and the United Kingdom, and the United States. The team has conducted more than 500,000 commercial flights, and its fastest real-world delivery time so far is 2 minutes and 47 seconds.
