March 15, 2022  – Instant deliveries of your online order via drone may sound like science fiction, but the industry is real and booming. Over the past three years, there have been over 660,000 commercial drone deliveries to customers, not including the countless test flights to develop and prove the technology (Exhibit).¹ As of early 2022, we estimate that more than 2,000 drone deliveries are occurring each day worldwide. The growth rate is accelerating every week, and we project that there will be close to 1.5 million deliveries in 2022 as a whole, up from just under half a million in 2021. And all of this without blanket regulatory approval but typically leveraging exemptions for very specific and constrained applications.

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