Updated May 14 at 4:25 p.m. EDT with comment from Harrison Shih, head of product for DoorDash Labs.
Charlotte, North Carolina, is introducing app-based drone delivery of food, beverages, medicine, and other items weighing 5 pounds or less within 30 minutes.
Food delivery platform DoorDash and partner Wing, the drone delivery arm of Google parent Alphabet, on Wednesday launched the city’s first such service, delivering to the doorstep of residents living within 4 miles of The Arboretum Shopping Center. With a few taps, customers can order from Panera Bread, DoorDash’s DashMart convenience store, and other local merchants. The partners are even offering limited-time giveaways—a $1 Panera mac and cheese bowl and a free care package assembled by local brands—to entice customers to use the new service.
The offering is an expansion of DoorDash and Wing’s collaboration, which began with a 2022 pilot in Australia before touching down in Virginia and Texas last year—and now North Carolina. Together, they have made tens of thousands of deliveries, DoorDash said Wednesday.
- READ MORE: Best FPV Drones for 2025
“Wing is operating today in Dallas-Fort Worth across 20 locations partnered with Walmart and DoorDash, covering a population of about 2,000,000 people,” Margaret Nagle, head of policy, regulatory, and community affairs at Wing, said Tuesday at a summit hosted by the Commercial Drone Alliance in Washington, D.C. “We deliver seven days a week. And our customers regularly ask us, when are you coming to my neighborhood and when are you adding more things to the catalog, more merchants to the catalog, and expanding our options?”
How It Works
Customers eligible for the Charlotte service will see a new “Drone” icon on their DoorDash app homepage. Tapping the icon opens a menu of drone-eligible restaurants. Users can place orders as usual, so long as they meet size and weight criteria—about 5 pounds—for Wing’s second-generation drone.
Once the order is confirmed, customers receive live tracking updates as their delivery approaches at speeds close to 60 knots. From order to delivery, the entire process typically takes less than 30 minutes, Wing said.
The drones do not land at their destination. Instead, they descend from a cruising altitude of about 150 feet to hover a few stories above the ground, lowering orders via a tether. Packages are automatically released when they touch down, often on the customer’s doorstep. The entire process relies heavily on automation, with drones following predetermined flight paths and maintaining communication with Wing’s flight management system. Even the loading of orders is automated.
Wing debuted the service with deliveries to the 18th hole of Charlotte’s Quail Hollow Club, where the 2025 PGA Championship will tee off on Thursday. The company is the official drone provider for the event.
Other customers can check their eligibility on Wing’s website and ask to be placed on a waitlist. The partners said they plan to expand the service to more Charlotte neighborhoods this year.
Betting on Drone Delivery
DoorDash is the first food delivery app to embrace drone delivery, and the service is baked into the company’s long-term plans to become a true multimodal platform.
The collaboration with Wing was borne out of DoorDash Labs, the firm’s automation arm which also explores sidewalk robots and other delivery technologies. Harrison Shih, head of product for DoorDash Labs, believes drone delivery has the potential to stick.
“We’ve seen that it’s not just a novelty or a gimmick,” Shih said during the CDA summit in Washington, D.C. “Our customers write us, and it’s a real option for a small number of customers today.”
Shih described food delivery in particular as the “perfect use case” for the service: “Drone delivery demands somewhat lightweight. It demands urgency. It demands frequency. And there’s really no other use case that does that the way that food delivery or what DoorDash has done for the last mile does.”
An initial pilot in Logan, Australia, allowed Wing to make its services available via third-party app for the first time. Based on the success of that program, the companies expanded to Christiansburg, Virginia, in March 2024, focusing initially on a single Wendy’s location. The collaboration in December then expanded to Dallas-Fort Worth, where Wing was already operating with Walmart. In June, the retailer introduced its own app-based service.
North Carolina is the next phase in Wing and DoorDash’s U.S. plans. The partners cited the state’s legacy of aviation—its license plates read “First in Flight,” a nod to the Wright brothers’ maiden flight in Kitty Hawk—and “forward-thinking approach” to drone regulations. In December, for example, it eliminated a requirement for commercial operators to obtain a state permit.
“We see what the U.S. has done with last-mile logistics as a leader already, and I think there’s an opportunity for us to step in as a country in a global landscape and usher drone delivery forward,” Shih said. “That’s where we would like to invest.”
The FAA is developing rules for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations as well as a process for critical infrastructure and other fixed-site locations to restrict drone activity. Both regulations could allow drone delivery to scale up nationwide but have languished in internal review for years. Nagle on Tuesday urged the agency to ease certain operational restrictions, as it did for Dallas-Fort Worth in July.
“If someone says, ‘Go build a drone delivery business,’ you want to be able to tell someone what that means, what the timelines are for building that, for expanding on it, for being able to be not just in one city but across the country,” Nagle said.
Summit attendees also urged the FAA to move drone operations out from under existing air carriage rules. Wing in 2019 was the first drone operator to receive the agency’s Part 135 certificate, required for commercial deliveries. But Nagle and others argued the regulation should be “right-sized” because it was designed for large, crewed aircraft.
“That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for a 10-pound drone that doesn’t carry a person, and the pilot is sitting in an operations center versus being on the airplane,” Nagle said. “We need our own part, and it needs to acknowledge the substantial differences in how our system operates.”
Like this story? We think you’ll also like the Future of FLYING newsletter sent every Thursday afternoon. Sign up now.
