Perhaps one of the biggest reasons I’ve been skeptical about using drones for food delivery is the payload problem. Food delivery drones have proven pretty useful at delivering individual meals or small items — think a couple limes you forgot you needed for the cocktails you’re making at your party, or a couple chocolate bars when the cravings come in.
But when I go grocery shopping, my hauls are much bigger than that. And when I’m ordering takeout, it’s never just for me. For drone delivery to be viable from a food standpoint, I think delivery drones need to be far bigger than the current drones that have been operating commercially.
Flytrex may have just solved that problem — at least for pizza.
The Dallas-based drone delivery company this month announced that it has partnered with Little Caesars on a small-scale project to deliver two large pizzas, drinks, and sides in a single drone flight. It’s all done via a new drone called the Sky2 that carries up to 8.8 pounds, which Flytrex claims is the largest payload capacity of any food delivery drone operating commercially today. The first location is live now in Wylie, TX, a suburb northeast of Dallas.
Orders placed through the Flytrex app flow directly into Little Caesars’ existing point-of-sale systems — meaning the restaurant doesn’t need to manage a separate tablet or workflow for drone orders.
About the Sky2 drone
The Sky2 drone uses an octocopter configuration (that means eight motors, providing full in-flight redundancy). That’s unlike the quadcopter design on many delivery drones, but it has a good purpose: if a motor fails, the remaining seven can maintain controlled flight. It has a dual-battery architecture for the same reason.
GNSS with RTK (Real-Time Kinematic) positioning provides centimeter-level navigation accuracy, which matters for the precision landing required to drop a package in a backyard without hitting a fence or a pet. Meanwhile, AI-enabled flight logic continuously monitors operations in real time.
Flytrex says its drone can deliver across a 4-mile delivery radius. That’s slightly farther than most early drone delivery operations, which tend to only deliver a mile or two from their hubs. And Flytrex claims the delivery time (not including time to cook and load the pizza) is less than five minutes.
Why I’m interested in these drone pizza deliveries
I rarely cover food deliveries via drone anymore. Though I’ve been covering Flytrex since the early days of its U.S. expansion, the onslaught of “firsts” has me tired of reporting too much on drone delivery: first coffee delivered via drone, first burritos via drone, first organic fair-trade dark chocolate via drone. But this drone delivery news is slightly different, in that the payload capacity means a more interesting leap for what has been a huge caveat in the powers of drone delivery.
The Sky2 can truly deliver more than what the competition is largely doing right now. Two large pizzas, Crazy Bread, Crazy Puffs, and 20-ounce drinks is a family dinner, and families getting that delivered in under five minutes by drone could be a genuinely better experience than any ground delivery alternative in a suburban market.
Flytrex has had a promising year after securing investment from Uber as part of a strategic partnership to fulfill UberEats orders. It’s also recently partnered with DoorDash to launch drone delivery in Dallas, and it also received FAA approval for Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations — one of the most significant regulatory milestones in U.S. drone delivery. And in another big news item, it collaborated with Wing to become the first commercial drone operators in the U.S. to implement automated flight coordination in shared airspace. Flytrex has now completed more than 200,000 deliveries across the U.S.
The first Little Caesars location is live in Wylie, TX. If you’re in the coverage area, you can order through the Flytrex app.
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