In theory, though, college kids can have such a pressing need for a tortilla filled with meat, beans, cheese, rice, and various condiments that Chipotle Mexican Grill (NYSE: CMG) and Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) have plans to deliver burritos via drone.
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Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is joining hands with fast food chain Chipotle to deliver food using drones, Bloomberg reported. A lunchtime rush of burrito orders will crank up the operational pressure of multiple orders coming in during a short period of time.
Project Wing comes from the same initiative as Project Loon – the balloon-powered Wi-Fi project to provide internet access to rural and remote parts of the world.
In news that is sure to delight students at Virginia Tech’s Blackburg campus, Alphabet Inc.
The university is part of the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership, one of six groups chosen as unmanned test beds by the FAA. The realistic conditions at Virginia Tech are a first step toward integrating deliveries by unmanned aircraft into everyday life, researchers said. Google said it chose to test food delivery to learn how to package sensitive cargo.
Lastly, the students will get burritos ferried to them in the sky, a dorm room dream come true. The research will address numerous policy and safety issues the FAA and industry is wrestling with: beyond-line-of-sight operations, flight over densely populated areas and coordination with other aircraft. A slew of tech giants, most notably Amazon, have been talking for years about the potential game-changing nature of delivery services by drone, but the Federal Aviation Administration has yet to clear the way for widespread testing. Vos told the publication that they picked hot food as a delivery item because of the challenge, such as keeping the burritos warm and intact.
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A mixture of Virginia Tech students, employees, and other volunteers will serve as participants in the study, which is expected to last for several weeks. Google also sees drone delivery as a way to help the climate, and noted that in 2014 3.1 billion gallons of fuel were wasted in traffic congestion in the United States. Bloomberg reached out to Project Wing’s leader Dave Vos for comment, and he said that all data gathered from the experiment would be available for the FAA to develop new regulations for aerial deliveries.
