U.S. drone retail giant Drone Nerds in June announced a new partnership with Swiss manufacturer RigiTech to add its Eiger long-range delivery drone to its enterprise solutions portfolio. Drone Nerds is already massive, claiming the title of the largest enterprise DJI dealer in the country. But with this new addition comes a pretty interesting expansion of its fleet. And more importantly for drone industry watchers, it could be a signal of a major shift in how drone delivery might work moving forward for small businesses that don’t have the resource to build their own drones from scratch.
Up until now, the drone delivery space has been overwhelmingly dominated by massive tech giants like Alphabet’s Wing, Flytrex, Amazon Prime Air or Zipline, all flying proprietary, highly guarded, in-house drone designs. Many hospitals, restaurants or retail companies interested in getting in on drone delivery end up hiring one of these delivery tech companies to manage flights for them (or just look at Walmart, which uses multiple of these companies to manage their drone flights).
But with this inclusion of the RigiTech Eiger in the Drone Nerds enterprise catalog comes a completely different model: an off-the-shelf delivery drone that an organization can buy, own and operate independently.
About the RigiTech Eiger
The Swiss-designed RigiTech Eiger is a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft designed for long-range, site-to-site industrial logistics.
Much like Wing’s delivery drone, it utilizes a VTOL design. That means it lifts off like a multirotor (requiring no launch catapults, nets nor runway infrastructure) before transitioning to fixed-wing flight for maximum efficiency and longer range. Some key specs:
- Range: Up to 62 miles (100 km) per leg.
- Endurance: Up to 59 minutes of flight time.
- Payload capacity: Up to 6.6 pounds (3 kg).
That 6.6-pound cap isn’t much, which means you should better consider the Eiger drone a better fit for carrying high-value yet small items. Think transporting blood vials, pathology samples, and critical laboratory specimens between regional hospital hubs. In fact, it even features an optional transport box compliant with UN3373 standards for biological substances.
How this could shape the commercial drone delivery market
By offering the Eiger through Drone Nerds’ standard enterprise sales team, RigiTech stands to gain an immediate, massive distribution pipeline into the U.S. commercial market. Drone Nerds will handle the hardware distribution, initial kitting, training and lifecycle support, opening it up to a bigger range of potential customers. That could entail hospital networks, remote mining sites, offshore energy companies, etc.
With this deal, interested customers who want a delivery drone of their own can now approach Drone Nerds, purchase a fleet of Eiger aircraft and use RigiTech’s cloud-based RigiCloud platform for automated mission planning, route optimization and fleet monitoring.
How U.S. regulations factor in
But of course while buying a delivery drone is now as simple as calling up an enterprise dealer, flying it at scale in the U.S. still remains something of a regulatory challenge. That’s because the Eiger is intended to fly Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) — something that is currently not legal without a waiver from the FAA. Getting one might be more work than a local donut shop seeking to do drone donut deliveries might have bargained for.Wwhile the FAA is actively drafting Part 108 rules to streamline long-distance flights, U.S. operators will still currently need to navigate individual tactical FAA waivers and strict airspace permissions to regularly clear longer flight legs.
For what it’s worth, RigiTech has a solid operational track record in Europe. Im fact, it recently secured a European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) SAIL III design verification approval that allows it to fly over denser suburban environments.
The Eiger is currently open for evaluation and procurement planning through Drone Nerds’ enterprise team. It may still take time for the FAA to catch up with the hardware, but the era of the proprietary, closed-loop delivery network has some competition.
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