A drone appears in the immense Texas sky, places a small cardboard box in a suburban garden and leaves immediately, almost without noise, in the indifference of the neighborhood.
Announced for years, utopia for some, dystopia for others, drone deliveries have indeed become a reality in certain parts of the United States.
Skeptics doubt that they can be deployed on a large scale while their defenders see them as a safer, greener and faster alternative to trucks.
That day, in Frisco, north of Dallas, Tiffany Bokhari received her chips and sparkling water minutes after placing an order on the app created by Wing, a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google's parent company.
“The bottle is still damp and
very cold ,” enthuses the 51-year-old Texan, opening the box that has just been placed on the ground.
Wing currently only covers a few tens of square kilometers in the region where it is content to deliver items from the Walgreens brand and the local ice cream parlor Blue Bell.
But the company already provides up to 1,000 daily deliveries in part of the urban area of Brisbane, Australia.
It is also present in Finland and limits its loads to a little over a kilo,
"either a roast chicken...",
smiles Jonathan Bass, Wing's marketing and communication director,
"to help visualize what can be transported »
.
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If hot meals, medicines and small items such as toothbrushes are gradually finding their place in the American sky, medical equipment has already been transported by drone for several years in certain regions of Africa.
Propeller-powered vehicles are used there to deliver perishable products such as blood when there is no reliable aerial infrastructure.
The United States is not there yet, but such services continue to be deployed in Texas, California, Virginia and North Carolina thanks to Wing, the Israeli Flytrex or the e-commerce giant Amazon .
The founder of the latter, Jeff Bezos, made headlines in 2013 after revealing his first drone delivery tests on the CBS television channel.
He predicted their generalization in the next five years.
Nothing happened despite the company's deployment in a large number of everyday areas, from streaming to health and food.
The fire of 10 hectares of vegetation that one of its machines started during a crash last year somewhat cooled the ardor of the group.
Progress has been less chaotic for Wing, which in April launched
“the first commercial drone delivery service”
in a US metropolitan area, Dallas-Fort Worth.
Some experts nevertheless point out the limits of this means of delivery.
“It would take a small army of drones to deliver the 150 to 200 packages in a truck
,” writes Bloomberg Opinion columnist Thomas Black, for whom small aircraft remain relevant for urgent deliveries.
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For Flytrex CEO Yariv Bash, meal deliveries by electric drone are not only less greenhouse gas emitting than those carried out by car, but they are also safer.
"Drones don't get tired, don't write text messages while driving and don't drink alcohol before driving,"
he told AFP.
“The service is simply better”
.
In the United States, the issue of security has been at the heart of government debates for the issuance of activity permits.
Although it only uses a drone weighing less than 5 kilos in polystyrene, Wing had to obtain the same certifications as DHL or UPS which make deliveries by plane, underlines Jonathan Bass, of the subsidiary of Alphabet.
He notes that a committee created by the US Air Administration has issued recommendations in favor of specific regulation for drones:
"I think that would unleash growth in the United States,"
he explains.
This is already happening: in a report published in March, the consulting firm McKinsey pointed out that the number of drone deliveries had increased from 6,000 in 2018 to almost half a million last year.
"But the future is uncertain
," the report added.
“Regulations, degree of consumer acceptance and costs will determine whether the industry reaches its full potential”
.