When Will We Get Drone Delivery? Walmart Has Already Made 150,000 Flights, In Poland It's Still a Legal Challenge

In this episode of Rozmowy Logistyków, Piotr Skobało and Adam Sobolewski discuss drone delivery. They cover why, despite pilots from Walmart and Decathlon, drones still aren't delivering our orders at mass scale, and what the biggest challenges facing this technology are.

WALMART: FROM A TEST TO 150,000 REAL DELIVERIES

Walmart's drone delivery program, running since 2021 mainly in the Dallas metro area in partnership with Wing (an Alphabet portfolio company), has already completed 150,000 deliveries and plans to launch 100 new locations in cities like Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando, and Tampa by June 2026. Key parameters: parcels up to around 2.5 kg, a current average delivery time of 19 minutes with a target of getting down to 15 minutes, and the most commonly ordered products are eggs, tissues, and other small everyday essentials — precisely the categories that fit within this channel's current technological and economic limits.

WHY REGULATION IN EUROPE IS FUNDAMENTALLY HARDER THAN IN THE US

The American FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) has a centralized rule (Part 135) that allows a single certification covering commercial drone flights nationwide, including beyond visual line of sight, without direct operator supervision. In Poland, the Civil Aviation Authority issues permits zone by zone — a retail chain wanting to launch drone delivery in Lublin, Warsaw, Kraków, and Wrocław has to run a separate application process and public consultations (police, city council) for each of those cities individually. This structurally slows down scaling this service in Poland and Europe compared to the US market, regardless of how mature the technology itself is.

POLISH TESTS: DECATHLON IN LUBLIN, 2021

In 2021, Decathlon tested inter-store assortment transfers by drone in Lublin — the business goal was quickly replenishing a missing product variant (e.g. a color of cycling gloves) in 10-12 minutes instead of traditional inter-store transport, while also optimizing inventory levels at each location. This shows that even in a restrictive regulatory environment, individual, well-justified business pilots are possible to run.

ZIPLINE: 1.5 MILLION MEDICINE DELIVERIES IN AFRICA

Zipline, operating in Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria, and Ivory Coast, had completed nearly 1.5 million deliveries by March 2025 (mostly blood, vaccines, and life-saving medicines) using a VTOL platform that drops cargo on a line from 100 meters up, carrying up to 3.6 kg of goods. The cost per delivery has fallen to a range of 0.6-1.5 dollars thanks to scale (over 1,000 deliveries a day) — proof that at sufficient volume, the channel's fixed costs spread out drastically.

WHERE DRONE DELIVERY MAKES THE MOST BUSINESS SENSE: MEDICINES

Pharmaceutical distribution to pharmacies in Poland (e.g. the PGF chain, with 14 warehouses and a van fleet serving pharmacies up to twice a day) often involves delivering a single package of a specific medicine against a patient's order — a model that fits perfectly within drones' current technological limits (low weight, high frequency). An added factor is the value and sensitivity of the shipment: the example of a pharmaceutical company that struggled to insure a package worth half a million złoty measuring 20×20 cm shows that in some niches, transport security alone can tip the scale in favor of a dedicated delivery channel.

B2B BEFORE B2C: A HOSPITAL HAS A LANDING PAD, AN APARTMENT BLOCK DOESN'T

Destination-point infrastructure matters enormously for scalability — a hospital with an existing helicopter pad can easily adapt a dedicated drone landing zone, while a block of a hundred apartments with balconies offers no natural pickup point, and imagining several courier companies simultaneously flying drones over the same housing estate quickly reveals the limits of scaling a B2C model in dense urban development.

MARKET FORECAST: 65 BILLION DOLLARS BY 2034, BUT NOT IN POLAND ANY TIME SOON

A PwC report forecasts the global drone delivery market at over 65 billion dollars by 2034 — at a unit cost of around a dollar per delivery, that implies billions of parcels a year, dozens of times InPost's annual volume (around 1.1 billion shipments). The analogy to e-commerce last-mile delivery by bike or scooter (Glovo, Wolt) suggests the most likely scenario: drones will enter a narrow but real market segment (small, light, urgent shipments, especially B2B and medical), not replacing the mainstream of logistics, but becoming a durable, additional delivery channel — provided courier companies start offering it as a ready, packaged product, taking the burden of securing regulatory approval off business customers' shoulders.