First FAA-Approved Drone Delivery in U.S. is Successful

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2488014,00.asp

A medicine-delivering drone from Flirtey completed the first-ever FAA-approved package delivery on Friday, bring supplies to a rural hospital in southwest Virginia. Said trip normally takes 90 minutes of driving (on winding roads) to ferry supplies from an Oakwood, VA-based staging area to the Remote Area Clinic in Wise County, VA.

In this case, two aircraft were used instead. A larger aircraft basically piloted from the ground (though using a real-life pilot for takeoffs and landings) took the medical supplies on a 20-minute flight from the staging area to Lonesome Pines Airport in Wise County, VA. From there, a smaller drone was going to make six separate flights to get the supplies from this secondary staging area to the clinic—a three-minute trip (plus whatever time it took took to load and unload said drone's payload).

The multi-step, multi-aircraft journey does feel a bit less impressive if you were assuming that a drone automatically carried and dropped supplies across a 35-mile distance. Unfortunately, that just wouldn't work due to the battery life required for the trip. (Perhaps someday, just not today.)

However, the drone's first two (shorter) flights were so successful that organizers decided to just go ahead and cram four additional flights' worth of supplies onto a single load and deliver that in one go—saving even more time than expected.