P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E
CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF CHOCOLATE A new drone delivery app drops snacks from the sky. SOHUM PAL
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n a Friday in October, I wandered into a parking lot on Crown Street, the roofs of the High Street fraternities peeking over the trees. I hoped I had found the drop point for Kiki Air. The day was sunny and cool. Overhead, I heard a buzzing noise. Cat and Josh pointed up. On the phone, a pilot asked me if I was “in a position to receive the drop.” I said I was, and a blue cylinder fell from about sixtyfive feet in the air, bouncing against a curb about twenty-five feet away from me. I tore open the padded cerulean envelope. My Toblerone bar had arrived; the drone flew away, arching over a line of buildings until it vanished from view. Yale undergraduates Jason Lu, Josh Ip, and Cat Orman hope this might be the future—lightweight snacks and sundries delivered by drone. That vision is driving Kiki Air, a drone delivery app for Yale students, developed by Lu and Ip. As Ip sees it, the coming years will almost inevitably include drones at our beck-and-call. Food delivery services like UberEats already exist in New Haven, and as Ip mentioned, the market for drone delivery is quickly becoming crowded. In 2016, Amazon announced “Prime Air,” a drone delivery service whose rollout has been continually delayed; Google, UPS and Walmart all have similar
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services in the works. But Ip clarified that Kiki Air is not competing in the meal-delivery or the package-delivery market, which are Amazon and Google’s terrain. Kiki Air’s small drone can only carry loads up to six-hundred grams. Rather, Kiki Air competes with delivery services like GoPuff, a self-described “convenience store delivery app and digital convenience retailer” available in dozens of U.S. cities, including New Haven, as of May. While Kiki Air’s prices are similar to GoPuff’s, its delivery time averages about five to six minutes, versus GoPuff’s half hour. Kiki Air currently has no minimum price for an order, and no delivery fee. As Ip explained to me, each morning from Wednesday to Sunday, a student pilot picks up the drone from “where it lives,” in an apartment near Whitney Avenue. The pilot fills two suitcases with the day’s inventory—mostly snacks like candy or protein bars, but also other convenience store items like condoms, menstrual products, phone chargers, and toothpaste. The pilot sets up on the roof of a parking garage near the Grove Street Indian restaurant Sitar and prepares for any calls that come in, starting at 12 p.m. Nearby, another certified pilot goes to a ninth-floor office space that Kiki Air has rented, which the company calls air traffic control.
THE NEW JOUR NAL
