The world’s largest store-to-doorstep drone delivery service will land in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina within the next 12 months.
In what the partners are billing as the “world’s largest drone delivery expansion,” Walmart and Wing—the drone delivery arm of Google parent Alphabet—on Thursday announced they will deliver items like bananas, eggs, and ice cream to “millions of households” in Atlanta, Houston, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Orlando and Tampa, Florida. The move will add 100 Walmart stores across the five new markets, they said.
The expansion builds on Wing and Walmart’s initial success in Dallas-Fort Worth, where they complete thousands of weekly deliveries in less than 20 minutes on average, the partners said. They also plan to expand beyond the 18 Walmart Supercenters in their DFW network.
“Our customers regularly ask us, when are you coming to my neighborhood, and when are you adding more things to the catalog, more merchants to the catalog, and expanding our options?” Margaret Nagle, head of policy, regulatory, and community affairs at Wing, said during a summit in Washington, D.C., in May.
Wing’s operation is highly automated. Functions like flight planning, traffic management, and even order loading happen without humans in the loop, making the service asset-light. Ground hubs are colocated with stores—such as in the parking lot—and take up about the space of a tennis court. The drones are permitted to fly within a 6 sm radius of the store.
Customers can check their eligibility for the service or sign up to be notified of availability in the Wing app. If eligible, they can browse fresh produce, frozen meals, snacks, household essentials, and more in either company’s app. Drone orders must weigh less than 5 pounds. At checkout, the customer picks an exact delivery location, such as their front doorstep or patio.
Store associates drop the packaged order at Wing’s curbside Autoloader, which attaches it to the drone’s tether. An array of propellers lift the aircraft to a cruising altitude of about 150 feet—high enough that its buzzing is muted. It then flies at about 65 mph (56 knots) to the drop-off point, lowering the package on its tether while hovering a few stories above the ground.
“This is real drone delivery at scale,” said Woodworth. “People all around the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex have made drone delivery part of their normal shopping habits over the past year.”
Taking Drone Delivery Nationwide
Delivery drones have been flying in the U.S. for years. But as services become larger and more complex, they are no longer a novelty.
Wing and Walmart’s three-state expansion comes just 18 months after the partners opened their first Dallas-Fort Worth hub in August 2023. Today, that Texas network covers about 1.8 million households.
“Drone delivery will remain a key part of our commitment to redefining retail,” Greg Cathey, senior vice president of transformation and innovation for Walmart U.S., in remarks accompanying Thursday’s announcement.
Walmart said it has completed more than 150,000 deliveries since investing in an initial drone partner, DroneUp, in 2021. It pulled out of that partnership in January after downsizing the network, which at its peak included 36 DroneUp hubs at Walmart stores across seven states.
The retailer also works with Zipline, which boasts more than 1.5 billion deliveries across four continents. The partners in April debuted a free-at-launch service in the Dallas metro areas of Mesquite and Waxahachie. It features Zipline’s Platform 2 (P2): an evolution of the longer range Platform 1 (P1) system it uses for medical delivery.
Wing is not far behind Zipline, having completed 450,000 deliveries in the U.S. and Australia. In addition to Texas, it offers delivery via the DoorDash app in Charlotte and Christiansburg, Virginia.
Opening the Floodgates
The expansion may signal Wing and Walmart’s confidence in the passage of two key regulations that could open up the U.S. commercial drone industry.
The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is reviewing the FAA’s proposed Part 108 and Section 2209 rules. Lisa Ellman, executive director of the Commercial Drone Alliance, told FLYING the rules are “two sides of the same coin”—a package deal that could grow operations without sacrificing safety.
Specifically, Part 108 would establish routine, standardized beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations under a special airworthiness certificate. Without a Section 44807 exemption or other waiver, drone operators must fly within view of a pilot or visual observer. These approvals are typically required for each individual service, which complicates the expansion process.
“If someone says, ‘Go build a drone delivery business,’ you want to be able to tell someone what that means, what the timelines are for building that, for expanding on it, for being able to be not just in one city but across the country,” Nagle said at last month’s D.C. summit.
Section 2209 would add a layer of security to BVLOS operations, allowing critical infrastructure, military, and other sensitive sites to apply for drone-specific airspace restrictions. These would grant access to “trusted” drones while locking others out.
“We want to allow known operators—who should be cleared into that area because they’re performing some sort of important function—in that 2209 UAS flight district,” Brandon Roberts, executive director of the FAA’s office of rulemaking, said last month.
The OIRA interagency review is the final step before the two rules are published in the Federal Register for public comment. Official regulations could soon follow, which would simplify the expansion for Wing and Walmart.
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