DHL Parcelcopter fails to deliver

I am a little bit sad about this one, DHL of all the grown-up operators had in my opinion created the best test program for delivery drones.

Benedikt Fuest writing in Welt had a word with their spokesman Alexander Edenhofer who said: ” We are not continuing the parcel copter project .”

So that’s the Wingcopter medical delivery trial in Tanzania, the collaboration with AAM darling eHang and all future drone delivery development.

DHL will have crunched the numbers on home delivery having a stack of real-world data. Amazon was always a PR exercise, perhaps DHL had an element of that as well, but at least they can genuinely say they have data to back up their business moves.

That entire drone in the box gig, DHL did that long before anyone else, back in 2016, that’s half a million drone years ago. Parcelcopter Skyports.

Again, I am sorry to loose DHL from the delivery drone space, perhaps some of the air grab going on by companies wanting to make money out of the first 400′ of airspace will cool now.

Several UTM’s are not motivated by safety, they are purely there for the perceived cash. I wonder if VC cash will look again at the market and pull the plug on some of the loudest exponents.

Delivery drones do have a place, I will stick by my assertion that outside of vital emergency deliveries, 100kg of payload will perhaps be the minimum viable delivery size for B2B, airport to airport, or big prepared area to another big prepared area. Just think of all those small municipal airports out there.

There are companies working on this.

Farewell DHL drone team, it’s been a blast watching you.

Note to young pretenders, there are some experienced drone delivery experts out there you need to snap up.