Brisbane, Logan a major hub for air delivery and travel services

A Google-linked aerial drone company is making thousands of deliveries each week to hungry customers in the Logan area.

South East Queensland is jostling to become a global leader in air delivery and travel services, with scouting to be begin for new air taxi landing pads next year.

While a new drone technology centre could also begin operations as early as next year.

Archerfield Airport in Brisbane’s south has inked a deal with Boeing-owned Wisk Aero to become the region’s air taxi hub and Australia’s busiest helicopter port.

The company has now revealed it will be working through next year with Skyports Infrastructure to identify viable sites for takeoff and landing vertiports throughout the southeast, which could include river and water-based locations.

This story is part of The Courier-Mail’s annual Future Brisbane series advocating for a focus on the right legacy outcomes from the hosting of the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games. You can read all our coverage here

A drone delivery operation at Grand Plaza Shopping Centre, Browns Plains. Picture: Liam Kidston

Wisk Aero infrastructure and regulatory affairs manager Dan Parsons said passengers would be able to book and board their flight from their preferred vertiport and disembark at a chosen destination.

He said the aircraft, which will designed to achieve a range of 144km, would then be charged and prepared for its next scheduled flight either returning to the original vertiport or flying onto another.

“For SEQ, we see a significant opportunity to be part of the daily transport network servicing one of Australia’s fastest growing regions,” Mr Parsons said.

“We are aiming at being a part of the region’s legacy building through the 2032 Games.”

The Underwood Innovation Lab (UiLab) is working to set up a Drone Centre of Excellence at a location still to be determined in the southeast.

A business case for it received $252,560 in funding from the state government’s Innovation Precincts and Places program earlier this year.

It is expected that a southeast-based DCoE would help expand Queensland and Australia’s drone ecosystem and accelerate the development of high value jobs in areas like defence, aerospace manufacturing, aviation management, transport and logistics in the lead up to 2032.

UiLab Chief Innovation Officer Dr Paul Mathiesen said if seed funding was secured, formal operations at the centre could begin from mid to late 2025.

He said the big ambition was to place the southeast region and Queensland on the map as a significant leader in the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) sector.

“I’ve witnessed the growth of the opportunity in Europe and in Asia and in the States, and our ambition would be to position Queensland and Australia up there as one of the leading authorities,” he said.

“We have been created to attract the investors, innovators and entrepreneurs … to help them grow and scale their business and assist the firms to grow and create high value jobs.”

Dr Mathiesen said the lab’s initial focus would be on using air mobility to solve efficiencies around transporting goods.

Wing Australia’s Jesse Suskin. Picture: Liam Kidston

But he said that knowledge could transfer to the future of transporting people.

“It’s how do we use the technology to positively impact the traditional supply chain and transport goods around in a cost, efficient, reliable fashion, and use that as a bit of a step towards the possibility of transporting humans in truly autonomous vehicles,” he said.

The Tokyo 2020 Games demonstrated a fast-approaching future characterised by advanced technologies and efforts toward a more productive lifestyle through its use of drone and robots.

During the opening ceremony, one thousand drones that dazzled above the stadium.

One company that has already harnessed the power of drones with hundreds of thousands of autonomous deliveries across the southeast is Google-affiliated Wing.

The company began delivering to a small group of customers in two suburbs in 2019.

Now it is making thousands of deliveries each week via DoorDash from 50 different merchants at the Grand Plaza Shopping Centre in Browns Plains, the Logan Hyperdome and Orion Springfield Central to 40 suburbs in the Logan, Ipswich, and Brisbane areas.

Sushi, kebabs, smoothies, bubble tea, coffee, groceries and over the counter medicine like Panadol are some of the more popular items being delivered.

The autonomous 5kg aerial drones are made of styrofoam, can fly at 110km/h, carry up to 1.2kg and deliver within about a 7km radius of its affiliate shopping centres.

Wing Australia head of government relations and public policy Jesse Suskin said on its busiest single day in Logan, more than 1000 orders were delivered.

Wing’s launch pads at Grand Plaza Shopping Centre, Browns Plains. Picture: Liam Kidston

“We noticed that a lot of the people that we would be delivering to didn’t live within walking distance to their shops,” Mr Suskin said on choosing to set up its first Australian operation in Logan.

“Sometimes to buy a litre of milk, or a freshly prepared meal, or over the counter medication, that might be a big effort, so we saw the southeast as an area that was growing fast and where we thought our service could be particularly useful.”

Mr Suskin said the industry was highly regulated but there were plans to try and expand services to more corners of the southeast.

“This has been a concept that’s taken off,” he said.

“You have a lot of people who are short on time and a lot of families where there is a lot of residential growth.

“I have a higher degree of confidence we’d find success, simply because, the area we’ve covered today, we’ve seen happy customers.”

Boost Juice franchisee Narell Hall, who has collaborated as a Wing merchant since deliveries began from the Grand Plaza, said the service had been popular and could make businesses thousands in sales they would otherwise go without.

“Those very first 18 months, I had 10,500 orders and it was $100,000 in sales to my business,” Ms Hall said.

“As a business you want to get your sales in whatever way you can.

“(The drones) get out there so quickly, are taking two minutes to get to my customer so my product is arriving in better condition than being in a car.”

A Wing aerial drone in action at Logan. Picture: Liam Kidston