UK's first drone delivery service is launched by Royal Mail
6Orkney has become the first location in the UK to have mail delivered by drone.
The Orkney I-Port operation has been launched by Royal Mail and drone firm Skyports to distribute letters and parcels between the islands.
In partnership with the council's harbour authority and Loganair, mail will be transported from Royal Mail's Kirkwall delivery office to Stromness.
From there, drones will carry items to Graemsay and Hoy where postal staff will complete their delivery routes.
The multirotor drone is capable of carrying payloads of up to 6kg (1st).
The project has been funded by the Department for Transport's Freight Innovation Fund and carried out by the Connected Places Catapult.
The aircraft is also equipped with a parachute.
The weather and geography of Orkney impacts the ability for Royal Mail to provide an uninterrupted delivery service for its residents and pauses in the ferry schedule – by which some mail is transported – are common during poor weather due to the challenges of docking safely. The DLV-2 aircraft has been selected due to its ability to fly in weather conditions that exceed the upper limits of the Orkney inter-island ferry.
This is not the first experiment with inter-island postal services in Scotland. In the 1930s, a German rocketeer called Gerhard Zucker twice tried to use rockets packed with envelopes to take post between Harris and Scarp in the Outer Hebrides: both rockets exploded.
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