Francesco Pizzeria, a little known Mumbai based pizza outlet, has successfully completed a test pizza delivery using a drone, avoiding the busy traffic of the city. Even though the distance was only 3kms, this drone delivery in India on an aerial route is the first of its kind.
The Actual Story:
The GPS enabled, remote controlled drone took off from the Lower Parel area outlet, flying at a speed of 30km/hour over the mill district of the city finally reaching its destination in about 10 minutes. It dropped the 13 inch, half kilo margherita pizza on the rooftop of the 21 story building in Worli. The so called customer, who in fact was a friend of the CEO of the chain received the package from there. The speed at which the delivery was done therefore beat the previous pizza delivery records of most leading pizza chains that estimate 30 minutes for manual pizza delivery.
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Commercial delivery using drones is something that is not allowed in India. But since the customer was a friend it cannot be technically denoted to be a sale. In the words of the CEO of Pizzeria, Mikhel Rajani, “We successfully carried out a test-delivery by sending a pizza to a customer located 1.5 km away from our outlet on May 11.” They have also filmed this first drone delivery in India and released in on YouTube. The above 92K views on the video is a clear indication of the excitement that people are in regarding this whole thing. The cost of such drones could be somewhere around $2,000 according to the CEO of the outlet. He also added, “What we have done now will be common place in the next four-five year.”+
Restrictions On The Way:
This test drone delivery in India could well turn into a reality in times to come. However there are certain restrictions that could come in the way of making this possibility into a reality. Let’s take a look at them:
The first and foremost is that drones are not allowed to fly above an altitude of 400ft.
The fact that drones are prevented from flying above security establishments could also be a limiting factor in implementing the idea of drones.
Technical difficulties of drones include limited range of operation after which its batteries get discharged.
The payload capacity of drones is also less since the maximum weight that can be carried is limited to only 8 kgs, that too in the case of eight rotor drones.
It was Amazon that made the concept of drones popular. They were the first to talk about doing deliveries with the help of drones. Now we have this successful pizza delivery experiment in Mumbai. With the technology advancing rapidly we could, in not very long span of time, see our skies filled with drones moving from here and there delivering products.
The Tech Cult 