On a blustery afternoon late last year, on the lawn just outside City Hall in Rowlett, Texas, a strange-looking craft cleared the trees just before me. It hovered overhead for a moment before lowering a second craft on a thin rope all the way to a parched patch of grass. The little, white thing deposited a brown paper payload, then rode its tether back up to its waiting mothership, which turned and left. The experience lasted less than 30 seconds.
This wasn’t some UFO experience. This was a Zipline drone delivery, out in the real world, and that payload was my lunch. It was just one of the two million such deliveries this company has made since 2016, carrying everything from household supplies in rural America to lifesaving vaccines in remote Africa. And soon, those drone deliveries will be coming to even more places.
Zipline is a California-based company that has only been slinging burritos and other items in the Lone Star State since 2025, but has been proving itself elsewhere in the world for nearly a decade now.
The company first started operations in Rwanda in 2016, delivering medical supplies in minutes to remote locations. Independent studies have shown the lifesaving nature of Zipline’s deliveries, making this the rare startup with a genuine feel-good story at its core.
In Africa, Zipline operates what it calls Platform 1, or P1, aircraft, fixed-wing, uncrewed machines that look like bigger versions of the toys your grandpa built out of balsa in the basement. Workers load four-pound payloads into the belly of these planes, then launch them into the sky via giant slingshot.
Once in the air, the P1s plot their own courses, up to 120 miles round-trip, reading weather data along the route and finding their own way around storms. They then deploy the payload via parachute before returning home for a cargo reload and a battery swap.
The delivery machines used in the US are rather more sophisticated but are likewise autonomous. Called P2, they rely on five motors and can transition midair from hovering to traditional, horizontal flight. This means they can launch and land vertically, or hover over a drop zone. What they give up in efficiency from the P1 (max range here is 24 miles) they gain in flexibility, making them better suited for the sorts of suburban areas Zipline is currently targeting.
The hallmark of the P2 is its tethered buddy, called a Zip. Each Zip has a single motor of its own plus room for an eight-pound payload roughly the size of a breadbox. Its propeller is there in case it needs to fight the wind as it’s lowered from the P2 aircraft hovering above.
The P2 is loaded with redundant sensors, even able to monitor nearby aircraft transponders. The bevy of sensors and smarts onboard means it’s an uncrewed aircraft capable of flying safely even in busy, urban airspace beyond the line of sight, or BVLOS in FAA-speak.
The capabilities of Zipline’s aircraft is proven through a strong safety record with over 125 million miles flown. That’s reassuring, but I was curious how Texans have been responding to this whole thing. After all, this is a state full of people you wouldn’t think would appreciate automated, sensor-laden aircraft hovering over their homes.
“Generally speaking, compared to some things that we picture in our community, there was not as much opposition as you might expect,” Rowlett Mayor Jeff Winget told me. “I think most people were really pretty excited about it.”
Winget told me the approval and permitting process took about five months, helped by Zipline working to keep its footprint minimal.
After receiving my lunch, I swung by one of Zipline’s so-called Zipping Points, where bundles are loaded for delivery. This one happened to be in a Wendy’s parking lot, but they can be quickly and easily deployed wherever pickups are needed.
The Zipping Points are curious contraptions, odd white kiosks with a pair of metal arms reaching for the sky. In theory, these enable retail workers to load in a delivery and walk away. The P2 then hovers overhead, drops its little Zip buddy to retrieve the payload, and then wings off to its hungry recipient.
I say “in theory” because, when I was watching, some deliveries needed a bit of manual help from a small team of Zipline employees dashing between retailers to ensure pickups went smoothly. Some pickups needed a few attempts, but all were on their way quickly enough.
And, crucially, even on a blustery day when drones are typically at their loudest as they fight the wind, the traffic overhead made less noise than the nearby intersection. The P2 hovers high enough overhead while receiving or delivering parcels that it’s honestly hard to hear, far less noticeable than your average consumer drone.
While Mayor Winget said the feedback he receives from constituents is incredibly positive, the relatively low noise pollution should help keep everything copacetic as the service continues to expand. Still, there have been some less positive reactions to the rollout.
John Erik Ege, the state director of the Texas branch of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), said there have been a few reports from concerned citizens since Zipline began operating in Texas. One, filed in September, described a strange hovering object that lowered something that traveled straight down, then “re-docked” before disappearing.
He also told me of someone else who reported a similar “mother ship” deploying a smaller object straight down. “She was frustrated that folks at work and friends ridiculed her. This is unfortunate. She did actually witness something,” Ege said.
That something, of course, was a delivery drone. This is hardly a repeat of last year’s New Jersey drone scare, but MUFON representatives in Houston and Phoenix would do well to prepare. Those two cities will be next to receive Zipline service over the next few months.
And how was my lunch? I must confess, it was fresher and hotter than any burrito delivery I’ve ever received, a noticeable step above what I’m used to from myriad terrestrial food delivery services. Ordering through the Zipline app was no more complicated than Uber Eats. My burrito had a delivery fee of $0.99, plus a 20-percent service fee (that’s capped at $6). And no, you don’t need to tip the drone. If you’re not feeling Chipotle, you can currently place orders through Blaze Pizza, Buffalo Wild Wings, Crumbl, Little Caesars, Walmart, and Wendy’s.
In the retail drone delivery space, Zipline’s primary competitor is Alphabet’s Wing, which also works with Walmart. While Wing has managed an impressive 750,000 deliveries, that’s fewer than half of Zipline’s tally. Amazon Prime Air, meanwhile, recently suspended its testing after a pair of crashes. For the moment, nobody looks set to challenge Zipline’s early lead, especially as it expands into Houston and Phoenix. That lead just netted the company a $7.6 billion valuation in its most recent $600 million raise.
Yes, this is yet another attack by robots on human jobs, but honestly it’s one I can get behind. In a town like Rowlett, if you get food delivered, it’s going to come to you by car, and the idea of a human being driving a 4,000-pound vehicle to carry a burrito in a paper bag is just a bit excessive.
Photography by Tim Stevens
