40 • The Sunday Times Magazine
Tech
CONTACT US
Write to us at
driving@sunday-
times.co.uk or Driving,
The Sunday Times,
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GFDRIVING.CO.UK
For daily news, reviews,
videos, buying guides
and adviceA g i f t f rom a b ove?
Look up — drone deliveries have arrived in Ireland and will
be coming to the UK in the new year. Nick Rufford reports
I
n the countdown to Christmas,
Mary Stapleton is scanning the
sky for a consignment of presents.
She’s not expecting them to arrive
by reindeer and sleigh but the
next best thing — a delivery
drone. Along with other residents
of her town in Ireland she’s
trialling a new airborne delivery
service that is due to begin in six
towns in Britain next year.
Stapleton was “customer No 1”
in this urban pilot scheme and her
first drop-off consisted of coffee,
a croissant — still hot — and a
Sunday newspaper. The 63-year-
old retired insurance assessor
looked on as the items were
lowered to her driveway from the
drone hovering 50ft overhead.
“It was fantastic to watch. A hatch
opened underneath this thing and
it was lowered down on a line,
almost to my front door.”
She went on to have pizzas
and other items delivered bydrone, and is now planning to
use the service for last-minute
Christmas gifts.
While there has been
widespread publicity for the idea
of flying taxis that allow fare-
paying passengers to hop from
skyscraper to skyscraper — an
idea that is actually years away —
the technology for delivery drones
has quietly arrived. Manna, the
Irish company behind Stapleton’s
deliveries, is confident that its
service — dubbed “you shop,
it drops” by some locals — is a
quicker, cleaner alternative to
road vans for distributing small
electrical items, minor groceries,
food takeaways and last-minute
gifts. It’s been conducting proving
trials in rural Galway for the past
year and for the first time is now
operating automated cargo drones
in a built-up area.
Stapleton says drone delivery
— which costs €4.20 (£3.50) adrop — saves her time and
money compared with a half-hour
round trip to her local shops in
Balbriggan, a coastal town just
north of Dublin. It’s more
convenient, she says, than
“driving round the car park to
find a space and waiting at the till”.
Each £10,000 British-built
drone is slightly bigger than a
herring gull and navigates to
an open space chosen by the
customer — usually a driveway
or garden. Customers summon
the drone by logging on to an app
and ordering a shopping basket
of items weighing up to 3kg —
the drone’s maximum payload
— from a range of suppliers who
have signed up to the scheme,
including grocers, fast food
outlets, off-licences and florists.
Manna picks up the products
and then dispatches them by
drone, flying above rooftops at
50mph. Journey time is typically