By Ira Boudway | Bloomberg

California-based drone startup Zipline plans to begin delivering medicines and other supplies to households in Salt Lake City, Utah. The company, whose fixed-wing drones have been transporting medical supplies to rural clinics in Rwanda and Ghana since 2016, has signed a service contract with Intermountain Healthcare of Utah to deliver to its patients in the city. Zipline expects the first deliveries to occur in the spring of 2022 and hit hundreds per day within four years of the service’s launch.

A zipline drone that delivers vaccines. (Zipline Inc.)

“We are excited to help lead the industry beyond the pilot phase and build something that can lead to a large commercial operation,” said Conor French, Zipline’s general counsel, in an interview Tuesday. The company will be able to reach around 90 percent of households in the greater Salt Lake City area with its drones, which navigate autonomously via satellite and parachute payloads of up to four pounds, French said.

Zipline plans to use yards and driveways for drops. Before it can begin, it must be approved by the Federal Aviation Administration. The company has applied for certification under the FAA program, known as Part 135, for unmanned parcel delivery.

“We are very confident that we will receive Part 135 certification in good time,” said French. (FAA spokeswoman Emma Duncan said via email that the administration would not comment on ongoing certification projects.)

Intermountain, a nonprofit founded in 1975 on a gift from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, operates 24 hospitals and 215 clinics in Utah, Idaho, and Nevada, and serves approximately half of the population of Salt Lake City over 1, 25 million. Initially, the zipline service will focus on homebound and immunocompromised patients. In later stages, Intermountain plans to use drones to fill out routine prescriptions and dispense over-the-counter medications, with patients using online registration to arrange delivery within 15-30 minutes. “We see this as a long-term relationship,” said John Wright, Intermountain’s vice president of supply chain and support services.

Since its inception in 2014, Zipline has said it has flown 15 million kilometers and made more than 215,000 deliveries, including hundreds of thousands of Covid vaccine doses, in Africa. Its drones take off from catapults and can fly back and forth for up to 100 miles – and service up to 8,000 square miles from a single hub. Earlier this year, the San Francisco-based company raised $ 250 million on a valuation of $ 2.75 billion.

Last year Zipline ran a pilot program that delivered personal protective equipment to two health facilities in North Carolina with limited FAA approval. Drone operators supported by Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and United Parcel Service Inc. have already been certified as unmanned airlines by the FAA.

(Corrects the number of Covid vaccine doses as per paragraph 6; updates the items Zipline plans to deliver.)

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Rivian’s all-electric Amazon delivery truck has started making deliveries in San Francisco, California. San Francisco is now the second city to sustainably experience parcel delivery with Rivian’s new van. This makes Los Angeles the only location where Amazon parcels are currently received from the fully electric vehicle.

Amazon customers had their first run-ins in the Rivian van on February 3 in Los Angeles when the highly anticipated battery-powered vehicle made its first package deliveries. With plans to expand deliveries to 16 cities by the end of 2021, Rivian’s Amazon van is now in the Bay Area, where the e-commerce giant is testing the vehicle’s capabilities in some of the more difficult areas for package delivery: tight populated cities.

San Francisco offered several advantages for the Rivian delivery truck in Amazon’s initial test phases. Amazon selected the city specifically for its great customers, unique terrain, and favorable climate.

Ross Rachey, director of Amazon Global Fleet and Products, said:

“From what we’ve seen, this is one of the fastest modern commercial electrification programs available and we are incredibly proud of it. As we continue to grow and invest in California, let’s do this We are very excited that customers in the Bay Area can see these vehicles drive through their neighborhood. “

In September 2019, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that his e-commerce company plans to buy 100,000 all-electric vans from Rivian to help reduce the carbon footprint of driving gas-powered vehicles. Amazon is one of Rivian’s largest investors and made a $ 700 million investment in February 2019. Shortly afterwards, the development of the delivery van began. The vehicle was presented in October 2020. It has a range of 150 miles per charge and is equipped with safety tweaks and other features to improve the driving experience.

Current delivery drivers who operate Rivian’s all-electric van have been specially trained to operate the vehicle, Amazon Teslarati said in a statement.

Amazon will initially use the Rivian vans to deliver packages from the e-commerce giant’s delivery station in Richmond, California.

“Richmond is a regional and state leader in climate action, including creating green jobs and infrastructure, implementing a robust climate change plan, signing the Paris Agreement in 2016 and more,” said city mayor Tom Butt. “It is fitting that Amazon’s new electric vehicles are being launched in the Bay Area from Richmond, and I congratulate the company on this important advance in reducing carbon emissions from commercial vehicles.”

Amazon also plans to start deliveries from other locations in the Bay Area soon. The company already uses thousands of EVs worldwide, but is also working on updating delivery centers to be suitable for EV servicing. Last year, Amazon delivered more than 20 million electric vehicle packages to customers in North America and Europe.

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