Drone Delivery Gets Serious: Walmart's Million Flights and the Rule That Could Open the Sky

For most of the past decade, drone delivery lived in promotional videos: a package descending gently on a winch, a smiling family, a promise that the future was five years away. In 2026 the genre finally changed. Walmart announced in May that it has completed more than one million drone deliveries. Zipline has passed two million worldwide. And in China, Meituan's drones have flown hundreds of thousands of meal orders across more than 70 urban routes. Drone delivery is starting to look less like a demo and more like infrastructure.

The numbers finally add up

Walmart's million deliveries came from 66 stores across four American states, and the pace is what matters: roughly 40 percent of that total was reportedly flown in a single recent quarter. The retailer is now expanding with Wing, Alphabet's drone subsidiary, to 150 additional stores this fiscal year, with a network of more than 270 locations planned by 2027, stretching from Los Angeles to Miami. Houston, Orlando, Tampa and Charlotte are next on the map.

Zipline, which began by flying blood bags to remote clinics in Rwanda, raised 600 million dollars in January to fund its own American expansion, starting with Houston and Phoenix. The company says demand, not technology, is now the constraint. That is a remarkable sentence for an industry that spent years explaining why its aircraft were grounded.

The rulebook waiting in the wings

The real bottleneck has always been regulatory. Flying beyond the operator's visual line of sight, the whole point of delivery drones, still requires case-by-case waivers in the United States. The FAA's proposed Part 108 rule, published in August 2025, would replace those waivers with a standard certification framework. The public consultation drew more than 3,000 responses, the final rule is expected in the course of 2026, and reported target dates have already slipped once after the government shutdown. When it lands, routine commercial drone flight becomes a licensing exercise rather than a legal expedition.

China is not waiting. Its civil aviation authority granted Meituan the first nationwide drone logistics licence in April 2025, letting a single operator fly commercial routes across the whole country under one certificate. Meituan reports that a busy site now handles up to 400 orders a day, and that operating costs per order have been falling by 40 to 50 percent each year. Bubble tea arriving by air in fifteen minutes is an ordinary purchase in Shenzhen.

Skepticism remains healthy. Payloads are small, weather is unforgiving, noise annoys neighbours, and the unit economics still depend on a scale that mostly does not exist yet. But the pattern is familiar: sidewalk delivery robots crossed the same threshold a year ago, one boring trip at a time. The sky is not full of drones yet. The paperwork, at last, is catching up with the hardware.