One recent morning, eager to satisfy his breakfast craving, Robert Wunderlich stepped into his Frisco front yard and turned his eyes to the sky. He spotted a small dark object to the north, approaching his home at 35 miles per hour. Soon enough he could make out the boxy shape of an unmanned aerial vehicle—a UAV, or drone—with a delivery company’s name, Flytrex, emblazoned on its side.
The model FTX hexacopter came to a halt and hovered 230 feet above Wunderlich’s driveway. Next, as its six blades continued spinning, it descended to a height of about eighty feet before opening doors in the bottom of its payload bay to lower its delicious cargo to the ground on a tether. A hook holding the package then automatically released, and the drone retracted its line before beginning the two-and-a-half-mile flight back to its home base.
Wunderlich, a 66-year-old financial industry retiree, picked up the brightly colored bag that the drone deposited and carried it inside to his kitchen table. There he unwrapped the order he had made less than thirty minutes earlier, via the Flytrex app on his phone, for himself and his wife Catherine: two bagels, with salmon and cream cheese on the side, from Einstein Bros.
Their breakfast represents one of hundreds of such drone deliveries made daily in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. When Flytrex, an Israeli company with North Texas operations based in Granbury and Little Elm, receives an order for some of the forty DFW area restaurants from which it offers delivery, such as Little Caesars and Jersey Mike’s, the chosen restaurant receives the order at the same time. But in the case of Einstein Bros. and some other restaurants, Flytrex has to call in the customer’s order.
A runner from the drone company traveled by e-bike to pick up Wunderlich’s order at the bagel shop, which sits about two thousand feet from the Flytrex drone base, in the same Little Elm strip shopping center. The runner picked up the food, placed it in a bag specially designed for drone transport, and ferried it to the base, where it was loaded into the UAV’s payload bay. After launching, the drone flew itself to Wunderlich’s home along a preprogrammed route. He was able to track the vehicle’s flight in real time on the Flytrex app, allowing him to step outside to await its arrival at just the right time. It hovered above his driveway for no more than about a minute.
Wunderlich considers himself a trailblazer of sorts. He was the first in his neighborhood to embrace drone delivery, and four other homes on his street have since become customers of the service. He figures that many more of his neighbors—and fellow North Texans—will soon follow suit.
He may be right. DFW already ranks as the country’s largest hub for drone delivery, with six UAV companies either already operating or planning to soon. Walmart is perhaps the biggest local user of their services—with drones flying from eleven area stores. The retail giant announced plans last January to expand this offering to reach 75 percent of metro households. And the Federal Aviation Administration could soon pave the way for even more unmanned vehicles to cruise the local skies.
In order to effectively offer delivery now, drone operators must seek waivers from the FAA to be allowed to fly UAVs beyond the sight of their pilots on the ground. Each of the companies operating in DFW have been granted this permission. But the federal agency recently signaled that it plans to use North Texas as the model for setting new national regulations—which it plans to institute in January 2026—that eliminate the need for such waivers. This policy shift has long been considered the holy grail for commercial drone operators and the key to opening the nation’s skies to thousands of routine drone flights a day.
It’s being made possible in North Texas first because a consortium of drone-related companies, working in close collaboration with NASA and the FAA, has developed a local UAV traffic management system. In less crowded airspaces, the job of keeping drones from crashing into one another can be accomplished by operators communicating about their planned routes, via text messages or phone calls. But in skies as busy as DFW’s, that’s not practical. So in June, North Texas became the first area in the country to implement autonomous drone traffic management for commercial use.
“I predict that when we look back at key moments that helped shape broader drone integration, this Texas effort will be identified as the spark,” said Brent Klavon, chief strategy officer for ANRA Technologies, one of the companies behind the development of DFW’s drone traffic system.
Joey Rios, who leads unmanned aircraft traffic management at NASA’s Ames Research Center, in California, told me that about a decade ago the agency recognized that there would be a growing need to establish a system to keep autonomous drones from crashing into one another. That led NASA to develop the initial standards for such a system, “and it’s those standards right now that are being implemented by folks in the Dallas area,” he said.
The system keeps drones separated from one another in flight much like the FAA’s air traffic control system manages passenger planes and helicopters. But instead of relying on verbal communications between pilots and air traffic controllers, the drone traffic is managed by a distributed network of automated communication systems that allow the unmanned vehicles to “talk” directly with one another and alter their flight paths to avoid collisions.
Operators cite several reasons why North Texas has become the leading hub for drone deliveries: favorable weather year-round, a host of relatively affluent suburbs with yards big enough to accommodate drop-offs, a large number of restaurant chains, and a technologically sophisticated population eager to embrace new innovations. The state and local governments are also considered to be friendly toward the introduction of new high-tech industries.
Flytrex has focused on partnering with national restaurant chains. Its American operations began in Granbury, forty miles southwest of Fort Worth, in 2022, and since then it has made more than 35,000 food deliveries from that hub alone. By the end of this year, it plans to open two additional drone stations in North Texas and ten more by the end of next year. The company, which also flies from two North Carolina locations, recently marked the milestone of completing 100,000 paid deliveries in the U.S.
Other operators, including DroneUp and Wing, are relying on deals with Walmart to make inroads in DFW. In a sign of the importance of the North Texas drone delivery market, the retailer recently said it would shutter its unmanned aerial deliveries from eighteen other hubs—including Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Tampa—to focus on North Texas.
Wing, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, began operations in Frisco in 2022, and says it now averages 150 deliveries per day from Walmart stores in Arlington, Fort Worth, Frisco, Garland, Hurst, Lewisville, Mansfield, and North Richland Hills. “There’s no doubt, with so much drone activity and innovation happening—especially in the DFW area—Texas has become what we’re calling the ‘Drone Star State,’ ” the company said in an email statement.
DroneUp, headquartered in Virginia, operates delivery hubs at Walmarts in The Colony, Dallas, Mesquite, Murphy, Plano, Richardson, and Rowlett, as well as three locations in Garland. The company’s chief technology officer, John Vernon, told me its drones can deliver groceries and snacks, as well as small household items, weighing up to ten pounds. Wing’s drones are able to carry about 2.5 pounds, Flytrex’s limit is 5.5 pounds, and California-based Zipline’s between 6 and 8 pounds.
Zipline plans to enter the DFW market with deliveries for Walmart sometime later this year, said Okeoma Moronu, Zipline’s head of global aviation regulatory affairs. “I think that we picked North Texas for a number of reasons. Obviously, it’s a diverse community,” she said. “And when you look at the Metroplex, we found a partner in Walmart that really has that footprint and is serving a broad swath of the community.” Zipline, which boasts that it operates the world’s largest autonomous drone delivery system, got its start delivering blood and medical supplies in Rwanda in 2016. It operates in four other African countries and Japan, as well as in Arkansas and Utah.
All of the drone delivery companies have done extensive community outreach before flying in North Texas. They’ve sought to promote public acceptance of the technology and assuage concerns about noise and privacy issues. Such complaints have been a problem elsewhere, including in College Station, where Amazon operates the state’s only other drone delivery service. The e-commerce giant is getting pushback from local officials over its plans to turn its small pilot program into a full-scale commercial operation. Citing residents’ concerns over noise, the city’s mayor, John Nichols, recently wrote a letter to the FAA asking the agency to put the brakes on the expansion plans until Amazon addresses the noise issue.
Up in Frisco, Wunderlich told me that the drones that deliver his food don’t cause much of a disturbance in his quiet neighborhood for residents ages 55 and older. “It’s not really that loud,” he said. “I would say that I don’t know if anybody would be able to hear it if they’re inside their house, but if they’re maybe standing out in their yard, they’d probably hear it.”
In addition to bagels, he and his wife have ordered pizza from a local Italian restaurant and chicken soup from Chick-fil-A. For now, at least, Flytrex isn’t charging delivery fees, but a company spokeswoman declined to say whether that would change in the future. Wunderlich believes that drone delivery is the wave of the future, touting its convenience, its lower carbon footprint compared with ground deliveries, and its elimination of the need to fight the area’s ever-worsening traffic snarls. “Traffic congestion has really become, I don’t want to be negative, but it’s a nightmare.” he said.
Another positive Wunderlich cites is that, unlike with ground-based services such as DoorDash and Uber Eats, there is no driver who requires a tip. “With those companies you know, if you don’t tip,” he said, “they don’t make the trip.”
