The era of drone delivery is getting closer

Today's expression: Inch closer
Explore more: Lesson #123
January 24, 2019:

Drone delivery is already a reality in some parts of the world, but challenges remain before it can expand. For one thing, drones need to be able to avoid crashing into each other. Governments also need to set the rules for flights of drones. Even so, they hold the promise of reducing delivery costs and increasing availability in remote areas. Dinner by drone, anyone? Plus, learn the English phrase "inch closer."

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What’s that in the sky? If you’re expecting a package in rural China, or your dinner in Iceland, it might be a drone

The prospect of drone delivery has been out there since late 2016, when both Amazon and Dominos both made deliveries by drone. But progress has been slow, so what’s the holdup? What’s keeping us from enjoying a future full of drone deliveries?

Those are the questions we’re going to explore on today’s Plain English. Before we do that, let me say, as always, thanks for joining us. Welcome to the program. I’m Jeff, the producer of the program is JR. He’s the one that makes it sound so great, he puts the episodes on the web site, and pushes out the audio to Spotify and all the podcast apps, so you can all hear it every Monday and Thursday. Without JR, I’d just be talking to myself. Kind of like I do every other day of the week!

I mentioned the web site. You can find the transcript of today’s episode at PlainEnglish.com/123, since today is episode number 123. Translations are available for the hardest English words from English to Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, French, and Chinese. Just hover your mouse over the highlighted words and instantly—instantly—the translation into your language appears. Just go to PlainEnglish.com/123 to check that out.

I was tempted to write a whole new episode on Brexit, but we’ve done at least two episodes lately on the subject, so not this week. But you may have seen that the British parliament rejected the compromise between Prime Minister Theresa May and the EU. It’s January 24 today and Britain is scheduled to leave the EU on March 29. Nine weeks away, and they have no plan. Either they leave with no deal or they try to get an extension from the EU. If you’ve listened to my previous Brexit episodes, you know I think they should have another vote. Time’s running out, though. The cover of a magazine in London called this The mother of all messes. That pretty much sums it up. If this topic interests you, you can listen to our previous episodes, which are Episode 113, Episode 105/a>, and Episode 80.


Drone delivery starts to take shape

The American online retailer Amazon.com made a splashin 2016, almost three years ago now, when it tested its first drone delivery. Domino’s Pizza delivered the first-ever pizza by drone in New Zealand in the same year. And although all my Amazon orders still come by regular delivery, the world is inching closer to the era of drone delivery.

Drone delivery has a lot of promise. You can imagine a world in which the streets are not clogged by delivery trucks, companies save money on fuel, the roads are safer, and delivery is much cheaper because it’s all automated. Plus, your delivery is faster and there are fewer mistakes. You can imagine that it would be possible to deliver things that are just too expensive to have delivered today—things like groceries and fast food. It could also benefit rural communities—places that today don’t get access to many deliveries because they are too remote.

And in fact there have been some advances in drone delivery. Let me give you two examples. About half of Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, can now receive fast-food delivery at home by drone. The service is provided by Iceland’s largest e-commerce retailer, Aha. Here’s how it works. You can order food if you’re along one of the 13 delivery routes throughout the city; drones can move off the route by up to 700 meters either way, so as long as you’re within 700 meters of a route, then you can get delivery.

The drones are automated while in flight. They pick up your order from a central place and take it to your house. When the drone is above your house, you get a text message. All you have to do is click “accept,” and the drone will lower your food down to you from a wire. You unhook the package and, bon appetite! Dinner is served.

Here’s another example. China’s second-biggest online retailer is JD.com, and JD.com has been making deliveries to rural Chinese villages for the past few years. The villages are so remote that it would be prohibitively expensive to ship items that far. But distance is no problem for the drones. Many of these small villages have a circle of artificial turf, and drones make several deliveries a day, hovering slightly above the circle and gently dropping the packages down. A local representative of JD.com picks the package up and delivers it to the customer, often using the occasion to show the customer more about how to order drone deliveries. Delivery in rural areas like this holds the promise of opening up access to medicine and other critical supplies that would be out of reach for such isolated places. Over 600 million people live in rural areas in China—that’s twice the population of the entire United States. All those people can benefit from drone delivery.

There are several things holding drone delivery back. First, it’s hard to test them in crowded urban environments. At this point, drones really only work where there are clear lines of sight and a low risk of crashing. Plus, it’s one thing to deliver a package to a person’s house—but what if that person lives on the seventh floor of a building? It’s a lot harder to drop a package on the roof of a building or on a busy sidewalk than it is to a quiet front yard. Unfortunately, when new technology is introduced, it’s usually people with a lot of money who can shell out for a new type of technology. After enough of them do so, costs start to come down for everyone else. That’s a particular challenge with drone delivery, since the wealthier people are the ones who live in cities—exactly the places where drone delivery is least likely to be successful.

Another challenge is that drones don’t yet have the technology to avoid crashing into one another. If routes get busier, they need to be able to see what’s around them and avoid a crash, kind of like what self-driving cars have to do. It’s one thing to fly a single drone, but it’s quite another to operate dozens of drones over the same area. In addition to the technology to operate a drone, companies would need special software to manage fleets of drones, kind of like delivery companies have to manage fleets of trucks on the ground. And just like there is one central air-traffic control system for airplanes, the software systems between delivery companies would have to talk to each other, so one company’s drones don’t interfere with or crash into another company’s drones.

Finally, there is the issue of government regulation—the issue that has been so difficult to solve with self-driving cars. Few companies want to make heavy investments in drone delivery without knowing what the rules are going to be. That’s why Europe is taking a proactive approach. Multiple European countries are working together with private companies in an initiative called Safir. The purpose is to develop a common set of drone delivery rules across Europe, so that companies will feel comfortable making investments in systems that follow the rules.


Here’s a funny detail I read in an article about drone delivery. Before you can get your food delivered in Iceland, you need to get all your neighbors to agree that you can receive delivery by drone before Aha will send you any packages. That means just one cranky person can ruin it for the whole neighborhood!

Time to say hi to a few listeners. First, Miguel from Xalapa, the capital of the state of Veracruz, Mexico, just joined us and is excited to have a new habit—listening to Plain English on the way to work. Thanks for being with us Miguel—actually JR is from a small town in the state of Veracruz, so you two have that in common. Have a coffee from La Parroquia for me!

Edith from Tijuana, Mexico, listens on her way to and from classes and while she’s out shopping. Thanks for recommending us on Facebook, Edith. Finally, Stainslav from St. Petersburg, Russia, sent me a note saying he listens on Spotify and reads the transcripts on the web site. Edith, Stanislav, Miguel—thanks to all of you for being with us.

And if you would like to help us out, you might leave us a review on Facebook, so your friends can learn about us. To give us a rating or a review, go to Facebook.com/PlainEnglishPod

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Expression: Inch closer