Drone Delivery Canada’s first commercial test flight ‘exceeded expectations’

MobileSyrup.com
July 21, 2016
Rose Behar

Can’t wait for the day when drones rule the skies? They may be getting closer.

Toronto-based company Drone Delivery Canada (DDC) has reported positive results from its initial commercial testing with university partners in Waterloo, Ontario.

The company didn’t go into specifics, stating only that “both flight times and payload carry exceeded initial expectations primarily as a result of development work which occurred at the Vaughan DDC lab over the past nine months.”

In September 2015, Canadian e-retailer Shop.ca announced it had started testing drone delivery with DDC. More recently, the City of Vaughan entered in to a Memorandum of Understanding with the company regarding a pilot program that will see local packages delivered by drones.

The company also notes in its release that it has recently expanded its staff, adding experienced unmanned aerial vehicle pilots and mission control staff to its technical testing team. In terms of future plans, it says more sites for Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) testing are going to be added later this year.

“BVLOS testing sites will be located across Canada, working with the Canadian federal government as DDC moves forward to obtain its operator status,” says the company in a release.

DDC’s stated aim is to build Canada’s first “railway in the sky,” using a depot-to-depot model “different to other concepts south of the border,” which presumably means they run more along the lines of delivering goods directly from the depot to the consumer.