MANY MINDEDDoorDash becomes a licensed air carrier, one of eight in the US
DoorDash has been granted Part 135 air carrier certification by the Federal Aviation Administration and is standing up an in-house drone operation, DoorDash Air. The company describes the certification as a five-stage federal review covering aircraft airworthiness, flight operations and maintenance documentation, an FAA-accepted safety management system, and a hazardous materials program, and says it is one of only eight drone operators in the country to have completed it.
What changes is DoorDash's position in the stack. It already delivers by drone through a partnership with Wing; now it can operate, fly, and maintain its own aircraft. The work sits inside DoorDash Labs, the team that produced Dot, the road-and-sidewalk delivery robot unveiled last year, and routing across couriers, robots, autonomous vehicles, and drones runs through a single software layer. The company says it plans to design and build its drone in the United States with mostly American-made components, and to make the merchant handoff hardware interoperable with other providers' aircraft.
The economics it is aiming at are in the middle distance. More than 20% of orders on the platform in 2025 traveled three to five miles, and those took on average nearly 25% longer than shorter runs, largely because matching a ground courier to a midrange trip is slow. Drone deliveries in its 2025 pilots averaged 25 minutes. Moving that band to aircraft makes both ends cheaper: couriers stay dense near merchants, and distance stops being a penalty.
Nothing has launched. DoorDash has not said which cities it tested in or where it will fly, and points to its Dash Forward event in September for details.
Source: The Robot Report