Alibaba drones start one-time test deliveries in Beijing

HONG KONG — Alibaba Group Holding is making its first trial drone deliveries in China, as e-commerce rival Amazon.com struggles to start a similar programme in the United States.

Asia’s largest Internet company is partnering Shanghai YTO Express (Logistics) to deliver ginger tea packets to 450 Chinese customers who volunteered for the one-time drone tests, said Alibaba.

Remote-controlled helicopters were scheduled to distribute 50 parcels from Alibaba’s Taobao Marketplace in Beijing yesterday, before moving to Shanghai and Guangzhou.

The flights, if successful and uncontested by the authorities, would give the budding commercial drone industry a boost in China, where the military allots only a fifth of the airspace to civilian use.

Amazon, the largest Internet retailer by sales, has begun testing remote deliveries abroad after asking the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to accelerate approvals for drone tests in Washington state.

“China is still in the initial phase of establishing regulations on commercial usage of drones. A lot of areas are still completely blank,” said Mr Zhang Qihuai, a lawyer at the Beijing-based Lanpeng Law Firm. “Key regulations regarding flight altitude and accountability for accidents have not been established yet. There’s still a long way to go before drones can really be commercially used in China.”

Alibaba and YTO said they have notified Chinese aviation authorities about the flights as required by regulation and believed the deliveries comply with all existing rules.

At least one of the drones was expected to fly from YTO’s warehouse in the eastern outskirts of Beijing and reach the 330m China World Trade Center in less than an hour. A deliveryman will await the parcel’s arrival on the ground floor and take it to the customer, a Taobao spokeswoman said.

The Civil Aviation Administration of China issued regulations in 2009 requiring operators of drones to be identified when applying to use such devices, said a posting on the agency’s website.

Chinese regulators are considering licence requirements for drone operators, a step the FAA is also discussing for unmanned commercial flights.

US moves to restrict commercial drones have frustrated Amazon’s plans to fly light packages to customers in 30 minutes or less. Drone use in the US was dealt another setback last month after an operator lost control of a quadcopter built by SZ DJI Technology and it crashed on White House grounds, said the Secret Service.

SZ DJI accounts for more than half the mini-drones sold globally. YTO declined to say which company made the drones used in the Alibaba flights. BLOOMBERG