The Sunday Times Magazine • 41Below: Mary
Stapleton enjoys
a coffee and her
newspaper courtesy
of a drone delivery to
her Balbriggan homeA local pub airlifts
Guinness to
customers: not
cans, but proper
hand-drawn pints
less than ten minutes because
deliveries in Manna’s Balbriggan
pilot tend to be no more than 1.25
miles away. Onboard detectors
check for people or obstacles.
Once the customer has tapped
“accept” on the app, the drone
lowers its cargo on a biodegradable
thread and releases it at the
chosen spot.
The UK towns earmarked for
similar trials are Chelmsford,
Wrexham, York, Stirling,
Sevenoaks and Newbury —
chosen, like Balbriggan, for having
suitable population densities and
housing characteristics. Drone
deliveries are not yet practical for
high-density urban areas where
too few homes have outside space,
or areas where the population
is too spread out to make the
service profitable. “Chelmsford in
Essex is a goldilocks town,” says
Bobby Healy, Manna’s CEO and
founder. “It’s not too big or too
small; just the right size for the
scheme to work.”
Drones are classed as
unmanned aircraft and require
permission from the Civil
Aviation Authority (CAA) to be
flown in the UK “beyond visual
line of sight” (BVLOS); that’s to
say, further than the operator can
see. So far the CAA has granted
only ten BVLOS licences to
commercial drone operators,
mainly for aerial surveillance and
inspection of hard-to-reach
installations such as oil rigs and
wind farms.
But Manna’s plans have support
from Grant Shapps, the transport
secretary, who has asked the CAA
to clear the flight path for such
schemes to take off in the UK.
“Delivery drones are no longer
the thing of science fiction, but
have incredible potential to
benefit communities, boost our
economy and make an important
environmental contribution,”
Shapps says. “We’re now working
with industry and the CAA to test
their viability. As world leaders
in aviation technology we
welcome this kind of innovation
— which, if introduced properly,
could relieve congestion on our
roads, cut emissions and help
deliver vital packages and
medicines to remote areas.”
While tech giants have also
been testing delivery drones,
a handful of start-ups are leading
the way in demonstrating that
the technology is feasible.
Manna began by doing up to 100deliveries a day in rural Galway
and expects to be doing 500 a day
in the Dublin area and similar
numbers in the selected UK towns
from next year. It says its drones
differ from others being developed
because they do not need to touch
down, which makes them subject
to fewer restrictions because
take-offs and landings can be
more hazard-prone.
“We don’t land,” Healy says.
“We hover over the area you
choose [for delivery] and descend
to about 15 metres before we lower
the product down to the ground
on a winch. Before we open the
cargo bay door we scan to make
sure that it’s safe, that it’s flat, and
there’s nobody there. It takes about
six seconds from our delivery
altitude to reach the ground. We
have a customer that regularly gets
orders to their garden trampoline
and that works fine.”
Healy, 52, has high hopes for
the business. “We believe the UK
could be the largest drone delivery
market in the world quite quickly
if the appetite from government
is there.”
In rural Galway, GPs can now
write prescriptions after a video
consultation and have medicines
carried by drone to patients’
homes. Bookshops and hardware
stores in Oranmore, on Galway’s
coast, deliver by drone and a
local pub airlifts Guinness tocustomers: not cans, but proper
hand-drawn pints in sealed
containers. Just Eat, the online
food ordering company, also uses
Manna’s drones, as does the local
Tesco, where drones take off
from and land on the store’s roof.
Linda Lydon, owner of the
Brazco Coffee Academy in
Oranmore, turned to the drone
service in the run-up to Christmas
last year when road deliveries
were suspended during lockdown.
“It was the only way to get coffee
to regular customers living up to
two kilometres away,” she says.
“We were sending pastries and
hot breakfasts to customers who
couldn’t get to town.”
Brian Dines, a computer
software engineer, has used the
service 83 times — more than
once a week — since Manna
began tests last year, including
ordering a cake for his son, Otis,
on his 11th birthday. “On one
occasion we were coming back
from a few days’ trip and we knew
we didn’t have milk in the house.
So we went on the app and
ordered a carton of milk when we
were half an hour away from the
house. As we arrived, the milk was
dropped off on our doorstep.
“When you run out of
ingredients while you’re cooking,
you don’t want to have to spend an
hour getting to the supermarket.
You just go into the app, pick out
what you need and have them
deliver. There are no traffic jams
in the sky.” At least not yet.
If drone delivery booms, the
GETTY IMAGES skies could get crowded. So