Doordash earned faa part 135 certification to fly its own delivery drones, becoming a certified air…
doordash earned faa part 135 certification to fly its own delivery drones, becoming a certified air carrier after hundreds of thousands of autonomous deliveries across its partner network, while alphabet’s wing claims well over a million completed home deliveries with ten-minute drops. meituan’s shenzhen network has logged 1.4 million drone deliveries on 50+ routes, and a tianjin emergency line cut blood transport from an hour to 18 minutes.
the drone logistics race stopped being about hardware.
Context
Verified event date: DoorDash announced on Jul 29, 2026 that DoorDash Labs earned FAA Part 135 air carrier certification and launched DoorDash Air, its in-house drone delivery program (DoorDash; Reuters, Jul 29). Drone Authority (Jul 31) says it is the eighth US drone air carrier.
Walmart (May 29, 2026) celebrated more than one million drone deliveries; AI Weekly (Jun 11) credits Wing with crossing 1 million through the Walmart partnership. Tianjin's first regular blood-transport drone route flew Dec 1, 2025, covering 14.6 km in 18 minutes (Xinhua, Dec 2, 2025).
The Part 135 certification matches DoorDash and Reuters. Wing's figure is for deliveries through the Walmart partnership, and 'ten-minute drops' was not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted. The Tianjin 18 minutes matches Xinhua, which says an earlier car trip took about 50 minutes round trip, not an hour. Meituan's 1.4 million deliveries on 50-plus routes were not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted. Its 2026 report says over 900,000 deliveries; the report is in Chinese and the counting basis was not checked.
Related work
- DoorDash: DoorDash Air ↗Jul 29, 2026.
- Xinhua: Tianjin opens a drone lifeline for blood plasma ↗Dec 2, 2025.
- AI Weekly: Wing tops 1M drone deliveries ↗Jun 11, 2026.
Watch next
- Find Meituan's cumulative delivery count and the Shenzhen route total.
Sources
- DoorDash: DoorDash Airabout.doordash.com
- Reuters: DoorDash launches in-house drone delivery programreuters.com
- Walmart: 1 million drone deliveriescorporate.walmart.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 1 October 2026 at 22:04 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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