Want 2 large pizzas and a few drinks? Now you can get that by drone in just over four minutes, thanks to direct delivery by drone. The only catch: you have to live in Wylie, Texas, where drone delivery company Flytrex has partnered with Little Caesars to get you your piping hot pizza almost instantly via its new Sky2 drone that can carry up to 8.8 pounds of cargo.
“Flytrex is laser-focused on making on-demand food delivery by drone a reality for everyday families,” Amit Regev, CEO and co-founder of Flytrex, said in a statement. “A big part of advancing this market is making sure people can get the food they actually want, when they want it. Until now, drones simply weren’t capable of delivering a full family meal. The Sky2 changes that.”
Here’s how it works:
- Open the Flytrex app and confirm your address falls within the four-mile delivery radius of the participating Little Caesars in Wylie, Texas.
- Build your order: up to two large 16-inch pizzas, plus add-ons and drinks, as long as the total stays under the 8.8-pound payload limit.
- Submit through the Flytrex app, which routes the order directly into Little Caesars’ point-of-sale system, the first direct POS integration of its kind for drone delivery.
- The store prepares your order like any other ticket.
- The Sky2 drone collects the order curbside via Flytrex’s “remote pickup” handoff, skipping the in-store courier step entirely.
- The drone flies autonomously to your address, averaging 4.5 minutes from takeoff to delivery.
- The Sky2 hovers over your drop zone and lowers the package by wire: no landing required.
I never get pizza delivered, because I happen to like my food super-fresh and almost as hot as it came out of the oven. That means I have to pick it up myself, even though I live less than a mile from my favorite pizza parlor. With drone delivery like this, however, the speed plus ease means I’d be ordering pizza probably more often than would be good for my waistline.
This, along with drone delivery in Ireland, Greece, Arizona and Texas proves once again that science fiction author William Gibson was right when he said that “the future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.”
Meaning: it’s not live in my city yet (grumble) and it’s probably not live in your city either.
The good news: it’s coming, and it’s coming faster and faster as Wing, Manna, Amazon, Flytrex and others continue bringing new markets and new products online. And integrating directly into Little Caesars’ point of sale system is a nice evolutionary leap that will speed up order processing and therefore fulfillment.
“Partnering with Flytrex to bring full family meals by drone delivery is a major leap forward, and a clear example of how we’re pushing the boundaries of convenience, speed, and accessibility in our category,” said Trish Heusel, VP of innovation at Little Caesars.
Flytrex’s new Sky2 drone is an octocopter, not a traditional quadcopter drone, and looks fairly capable, if perhaps a bit short range.
- Payload: Up to 8.8 lbs, the largest of any food-focused delivery drone, according to Flytrex
- Range: 4-mile delivery radius (the drone can presumably fly much farther at need)
- Speed: 4.5 minutes average from takeoff to delivery
- Configuration: Octocopter (eight motors) for full in-flight redundancy
- Power: Dual-battery architecture
- Navigation: GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) with real-time positioning for centimeter-level accuracy, theoretically
- Flight control: AI-enabled flight logic for continuous monitoring and management
- Pickup: Supports remote pickup directly from restaurant exteriors
- Capacity benchmark: Can carry two large 16″ pizzas plus a 20oz drink in a single delivery
The Sky2 drone includes “AI-enabled flight logic continuously monitors and manages flight operations to ensure safe, reliable performance on every delivery,” Flytrex says. Flytrex has completed over 200,000 deliveries across the United States in North Carolina, where Flytrex has operated for several years and residents place more than 1,000 orders per month, and Texas.
Based on its press release claims, Flytrex has doubled in deliveries over the last year, suggesting that the company is starting to scale in earnest. 200,000 total deliveries is still small compared to its competitors like Google (Wing) and Manna Aero, but the company said it plans to “expand its service nationwide to the 37 largest metro areas in the U.S. — unlocking the ability to bring drone delivery to over 100 million people.”
Currently Alphabet’s (Google’s) Wing has done over 750,000 deliveries and Manna has done at least 250,000, while targeting 10X growth this year. Amazon Prime is still pre-scaling, with far fewer publicly confirmed deliveries.
