I’ve never been to Scandinavia, but from what I’ve seen, it looks like a pretty good time. Beautiful scenery, beautiful people, everyone seems very happy.
This story might explain why that is.
According to The Verge, a company in Iceland is setting up a delivery service for goods like hamburgers and beer that uses drones to make part of the journey over water.
Flytrex doesn’t make drones. Instead, it’s spent the past few years working on solving for the rest of the drone delivery equation. That involves working with local regulators (Icelandic Transport Authority, or Icetra, in this scenario), training employees, and most importantly, building a cloud-based network that the entire drone delivery system runs on.
As with most early drone delivery trial runs, there’s a catch: there’s only one delivery route right now, and the drone is currently only part of the equation. What Flytrex and AHA are doing is using a hexacopter (a modified DJI Matrice 600) to deliver food or other products directly across a bay of the North Atlantic Ocean that delivery drivers normally have to skirt around. Basically, someone at the AHA facility loads the delivery up on the drone, it skips over the bay, and the delivery person takes it from there. Deliveries that would have normally taken more than half an hour can now be made in a matter of minutes.
Not settling for extra lag time between placing a beer order and having it show up at your doorstep is probably a good example of why everyone is so happy all the time there. (The post also mentions sushi, which should make all my pescatarian friends happy, but screw that, give me a burger post haste. Why yes, I am from Indiana, why do you ask?)
It’s an interesting approach for Flytrex, the company involved, which sounds more like a logistics firm than anything else; positioning yourself as the people other businesses turn to when they want to get into the drone game seems like a great idea, if drone deliveries really do become more of a thing. And hey, Scandinavia seems like a place for early adopters, too.
It’s likely not going to be possible to order a Bell’s Two-Hearted and some Five Guys and have it dropped off via drone at your place here any time soon, though. Fortunately, there are plenty of cheap flights to Iceland.
