Why is drone delivery popular?
2024-08-06
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As an important supplement to ground transportation capacity, drone delivery has brought a new leap in transportation timeliness and delivery experience. Express logistics companies should continue to increase investment in research and development, break through to achieve normalized operations in harsh weather environments, and meet people's needs for drone logistics anytime and anywhere.
Timeliness is an important criterion for measuring express delivery services. From placing an order to receiving the goods, it takes less than 24 hours. This is the speed at which the Wushan crisp plums in Chongqing are now out of the mountains and flying across the country. Among them, the Chongqing Post cargo drones involved in the transportation of crisp plums have made an indelible contribution. From the orchard to Wushan Airport, the commissioning of cargo drones has reduced the land transportation time from 2 hours to 7 minutes, which not only greatly improved the transportation efficiency of crisp plums, but also marked the first time that China Post has achieved large-scale normalized operation of "air-to-air transport" in Wushan.
A drone carrying food. Photo by Mao Siqian (Xinhua)
In fact, drone delivery is nothing new. Since SF Express obtained the first drone aviation operation license in 2018, drone delivery services have gradually come into the public eye and have been continuously expanded to logistics and delivery scenarios such as medical supplies, emergency rescue, fresh cold chain, and cross-sea transportation. At present, SF Express Fengyi drones have achieved large-scale normalized operations in the Greater Bay Area. In June this year, the average daily transport volume exceeded 20,000 tickets, doubling from the beginning of the year.
There are two main factors that cannot be ignored for the popularity of drone delivery. The first is demand-driven. In recent years, with the accelerated upgrading of equipment in the express logistics industry, efficiency has continued to improve, and "half-day delivery", "hour delivery" and "minute delivery" have constantly refreshed people's perception of express delivery speed. Compared with traditional transportation methods, the biggest advantage of drone delivery is high efficiency, especially in congested urban roads. Drones can bypass ground obstacles and deliver packages to customers on time. Especially for the delivery of fresh agricultural products, drone delivery can greatly improve the transit time and ensure the freshness of agricultural products. For express logistics companies, continuing to explore the application of drones will help companies gain more advantages in the fierce market competition.
The second is policy promotion. In February 2021, the low-altitude economy was formally proposed in the "Outline of the National Comprehensive Three-dimensional Transportation Network Planning" and was written into the "Government Work Report" as one of the "new growth engines" this year. With the implementation of a series of policy measures, drone delivery, as an important carrier of the low-altitude economy, has taken root in more and more cities. In Shuibei, Luohu, Shenzhen, a gold and jewelry trading distribution center, drones fly over tall buildings every day to deliver gold jewelry, helping small and medium-sized gold and jewelry companies reduce costs and increase efficiency; in Zhengzhou, Anyang and other places in Henan, drone logistics same-city delivery pilots have also been launched first, and measures to support the opening of low-altitude logistics delivery routes have been introduced one after another.
On June 28, a drone carrying Guiyang's specialty agricultural products took off. Photo by Liu Kun (Xinhua)
As an important supplement to ground transportation capacity, drone delivery has brought a new leap in transportation timeliness and delivery experience, but there is still a long way to go before drone delivery can enter thousands of households. Limited by weather and other climatic factors, most cargo drone operations on the market currently have to "depend on the weather". Express logistics companies should continue to increase investment in research and development, break through to achieve normalized operations in harsh climate environments, and meet people's needs for drone logistics anytime and anywhere. Local governments should also take appropriate measures to relax the application of drone delivery scenarios. In areas with strong demand, they should also increase the density of low-altitude logistics route networks, so that more and more people can enjoy convenient and fast delivery services.
As an emerging track, the relevant laws and regulations for drone delivery are not yet perfect, and the industry standards for product materials, batteries, sites, etc. are also different, which urgently need to be further clarified and standardized. Relevant departments should include cargo drones in the smart city construction plan and continuously improve the public infrastructure for drone delivery, such as control centers, take-off and landing aprons, and low-altitude route designation. In this way, drones can fly far and be controlled during flight.
(Author: Ji Leilei), original title: Why is drone delivery so popular?
Source: Economic Daily
