Drone to home: Domino’s unveils plans for airborne pizza deliveries

Forget the spotty teenagers with perilous top boxes on dodgy-looking mopeds … your pizza could soon be coming to you by drone. Domino’s Pizza is planning to become the world’s first company to offer a commercial drone delivery service after conducting a trial run in New Zealand. The company carried out a demonstration delivery by drone in Auckland on Thursday and afterwards said it aimed to launch a regular service in late 2016.

We’ve always said that it doesn’t make sense to have a 2-tonne machine delivering a 2kg order

Don Meij, the chief executive of Domino’s Pizza Enterprises

Last year, New Zealand became one of the first countries to allow commercial drone deliveries. Speaking after the Domino’s test flight, the transport minister, Simon Bridges, said: “Our enabling laws and regulation means we have the ideal environment.” But Philip Solaris, the director of drone company X-craft Enterprises, said Domino’s could be hampered by a rule requiring drones to be kept in sight at all times. It would also need to avoid “random hazards such as power lines, moving vehicles, children in the backyard playing”.

I can’t truly see how commercially viable that idea is, because you would have to literally have somebody walking along to keep it in the line of sight, watching it at all times

Philip Solaris, drone company boss

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