One drone lifts up into the sky at a shopping centre on the outskirts of Dublin, then another. They rise to 70ft (21 metres), tilt forward and zip away in different directions, each carrying a paper bag.
On a sleepy morning in the Irish capital the takeoffs build to a steady one every few minutes, with barely anyone glancing at the constant stream of aircraft buzzing back and forth.
“No one’s looking up – no one ever looks up,” says the man responsible, Bobby Healy, the founder of the Dublin startup Manna Aero.
People probably should take notice, because the drones are part of an effort to realise an ambition shared by Amazon, the Google sister company Wing and the Californian startup Zipline: instant, autonomous home delivery. Healy and his big-tech rivals hope drone delivery will change the course of the retail industry across Ireland, and then into the UK as soon as this year.
Drones have already made a huge impact on things ranging from photography to light shows, humanitarian missions to the war in Ukraine. The promise is obvious: skip terrestrial congestion. However, the companies now have to persuade investors and the public. Previous Wing trials in Australia faced public opposition.
Amazon is operating in Texas, Arizona and Italy, and is seeking permission to fly drones from warehouses in England, while Wing is already operating in several countries. Yet Manna Aero appears to be right in the mix. It has flown 200,000 delivery flights in the Dublin suburb of Blanchardstown, as well as in Helsinki, Finland. Deals with Just Eat and DoorDash could help as it to expand and attract businesses ranging from restaurants, tool stores and bookshops.
On Manna’s app the Guardian orders two coffees to be delivered to a borrowed house. A speck on the horizon gradually resolves itself into a quadcopter as it skims over the Dublin suburban skyline. It approaches the garden, hovers momentarily, and then drops the paper bag on a biodegradable string. The drone flies off, leaving two warm, unspilled coffees.
The coffees arrived 16 minutes after we put in the order on the app, including time for preparation. That compares with preparation time plus a minimum of 11 minutes for someone delivering the same on an e-bike.
Crucially though, the drones do not need to lug around a human, meaning they use less energy, Healy says. Each aircraft does about 80 deliveries a day, he says – well over double what a delivery driver or rider would generally do. On top of that, a drone “pilot” is able to oversee up to 20 aircraft at once, Healy adds.
Autonomous drones
The drones are autonomous from the point that they are loaded and given the OK to lift off from the base. Six minutes later, on average, the drones arrive at the house, and hover above the garden. The only intervention from a pilot is when a video flicks on back at the base to check whether the ground is clear of people or cars.
“In suburbs that delivery driver thing is a broken model,” says Healy. “There’s no way you can get a delivery driver to do that and make it profitable.”
Healy, a Dubliner, describes himself as a “tech guy”. He left school at 17 to make video games and then started and sold six businesses, most recently CarTrawler, which operates vehicle rental services for airline websites. He founded Manna in 2018 because he wanted to make “measurable impact planet-wide”, bringing coders with him to take on the challenge of creating autonomous drones.
The drones were designed by Manna’s teams in Monmouth, Wales, and Dublin, with aerospace-grade parts made mostly in China. Each one weighs 23kg (51lb), including up to 4kg of cargo, a weight that will allow them to fly in the US.
That is easily enough to carry four 15-inch pizzas for a family, or transport several books, although “volume is harder than weight”. One delivery of 24 toilet rolls in Finland had to be halved because they would not all fit. “Must have been an emergency,” says Healy.
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The drones have eight motors, although they can easily fly on four if disaster strikes. There is also an inbuilt parachute, although that has only been used once in 200,000 flights over four years, and European aerospace regulators have audited the company’s tech.
The drones operate from bases squeezed in bits of land that can fit a couple of shipping containers and five 2 metre squared landing zones. Manna employees in the containers prepare the orders, charge the batteries, which are swapped out after each flight, and oversee the drops in a 2.1-mile (3.4km) circle.
Expansion plans
Manna’s catchment area covers 150,000 people in Blanchardstown. By the end of the year, the company expects to cover about a million people across Dublin. That would be most of the city outside the centre, where shorter distances and fewer private gardens for drops rule out Manna for now. (City centre rooftop deliveries hold promise, but the idea of deliveries to flats on the fourth floor seems unlikely, Healy says.) By the end of the year Healy hopes to be at a rate of 2m flights annually.
Healy says the UK launch has been held up by regulation, although the adoption of EU drone standards on 1 April could open the door as soon as this year, or “definitely” 2026. Customers in Ireland pay a €1.99 (£1.73) delivery fee, but Healy pledges that deliveries will be free for users when the service starts in unnamed UK cities. Businesses will instead pay a commission.
Manna still has a lot of obstacles ahead. Each flight is profitable now, but the cost of expansion will still be high for the loss-making company. It has done everything so far on a shoestring €60m in venture capital money, with Coca-Cola and Patrick Collison, the founder of the fintech firm Stripe, on board as investors.
Healy also knows that some people will balk at the idea of instant retail gratification. Birds know to keep away, but the company may in the future have to solve the problem of avoiding rival operators’ aircraft.
Yet Healy is ebullient about the future of drone deliveries.
“It will enable a totally different form of commerce to what we have today,” he says. “People in small businesses beating the giants. If you can move everything in three minutes then you have an Amazon slayer.”
