VIDEO: Walmart, Wing drone service reaching new heights in Dallas-Fort Worth

The whirring of tiny propellers buzzing from a fenced-off launchpad in the Walmart parking lot in Frisco, Texas, grabbed shoppers’ attention on a recent weekday morning. 

Some were rubbernecking without breaking pace, while others stopped to get a better look. A few pulled out their cameras to get a photo. 

The launchpad, which takes up a fraction of the massive parking lot at the Walmart Supercenter at 8555 Preston Road, is nothing new to customers who frequent the big-box retailer often. 

The drone delivery partnership between Walmart and Wing, owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, was announced in late August 2023, with the Frisco store being its first delivery site. 

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The company has since expanded to a Supercenter in nearby Lewisville and two more in the Fort Worth suburb of North Richland Hills. In late April, Walmart said that it plans to expand to 30 towns in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area and offer delivery to three-quarters of the population. 

Jacob Demmitt, who oversees marketing for Wing, gave Supermarket News a demonstration of the Frisco Walmart drone operation on a recent overcast day, which begged the question: Can drones deliver in the rain?

Making deliveries in Dallas-Fort Worth means operating in a variety of weather conditions, according to Demmitt. “Our drones are built to be able to fly in rain and windy conditions and in hot and cold weather,” he said. 

Related:Walmart drones are hitting more areas

The drone operation in Frisco houses 18 drones that can fly as far as six miles at a top speed of 65 miles per hour—and it’s all done autonomously. Demmitt said the drones figure out their own route to get to the drop-off site and control themselves along the way. 

“We have pilots overseeing the system from a remote location, but they're just watching dots move on a screen and making sure everything's going well. There’s no joystick there,” Demmitt said. 

When the first order of the day was placed, a Walmart employee appeared from the store with a small aerodynamic cardboard box with a handle—the aircraft is built to carry loads of around three pounds. 

One of the drones launched into the air, and a tether descended from the body of the aircraft. The Walmart worker attached the package, which was then drawn up to the underside of the drone.

The aircraft then ascended to about 200 feet above the ground, and off it went. 

“Part of the beauty of this system is that the loader doesn't need to interact with the aircraft, so it doesn't require specialized training,” Demmitt explained.

Related:Walmart unleashes ‘largest drone delivery footprint of any U.S. retailer’

Most deliveries make it to their destination in under 30 minutes, according to Demmitt. He added that the fastest delivery to date is two minutes and 47 seconds. 

When the drone arrives at the customer’s location, it hovers about 23 feet above the ground, lowers the package to the ground, and then returns to its launchpad. 

See the demonstration:

He said the service is growing in popularity—on a recent Sunday, Wing made about 130 deliveries.

Onlookers in the parking lot often stop by the launchpad to ask questions about the service, according to Demmitt.

“Whenever we go into new communities, we understand that people are going to have questions, so we try to answer as many as we can,” he said. “We go to a lot of community events, we do demos for school groups, and really anybody that asks, to make sure that everyone knows what's going on.”

Walmart is continuing to expand the program in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and Demmitt said Wing is ready to scale its program. 

“None of this is screwed down except for the fence. It's just kind of laid out. It's designed to where we can drop a container with some drones and some pads and launch a service very very, very quickly. And so everything about our system is designed to scale,” he said.