Walmart is starting to deliver at-home COVID-19 tests by drone. A trial got underway in North Las Vegas today and the deliveries will expand to Cheektowaga, New York early next month.

It’s delivering the kits to qualifying patients who live within a mile of certain Walmart Supercenters in both locales. Patients will self-administer a nasal swab, which they’ll send to Quest Diagnostics for testing.

At this point, Zipline has plenty of experience — Walmart says they have the world’s largest drone delivery network. Zipline has been operating since late 2016, starting in Rwanda with a focus on delivery medical supplies. More recently, Zipline has been operating in Ghana since 2019 and has been key in delivering supplies like personal protective equipment to medical professionals throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

Earlier this year, Zipline expressed ambitions to enter the US market; it has been in discussions with Novant Health about delivering PPE and medical equipment to its campuses near Charlotte, NC. Between this potential deal and its pilot with Walmart, it sounds like Zipline’s plans for US growth have found some traction.

As for Walmart, this is the second drone delivery deal the company has made in the last week. Just a few days ago, the retailer announced a pilot program with drone company Flytrex, which will use its more traditional quadcopter delivery drones to deliver groceries and other household supplies. That pilot will take place from Walmart stores near Fayetteville, NC.

“This certification is an important step forward for Prime Air and indicates the FAA’s confidence in Amazon’s operating and safety procedures for an autonomous drone delivery service that will one day deliver packages to our customers around the world,” David Carbon, an Amazon vice president, said in a statement.

Amazon is not the first drone operator to receive FAA approval. Alphabet subsidiary Wing and UPS are also operating FAA-approved trials. In Virginia, Wing is delivering over-the-counter meds, snacks and gifts on behalf of FedEx, Walgreens and a local retailer. UPS is delivering prescriptions for CVS in North Carolina.

Amazon has been openly discussing its drone delivery ambitions for years, but the pandemic may serve as an added push for the company. Amazon has seen a massive uptick on online sales in the past few months — enough to double its profits last quarter. It has hired more than 100,000 additional workers, but it seems that delivering orders via flying and rolling delivery bots may be another part of its plan to keep up with the added demand.

Schools and libraries have been closed for months, but some kids aren’t going to get away with playing video games all summer. Kelly Passek — a middle school librarian in Montgomery County, Virginia — is sending out summer reading via drones. After using the quadcopters from Wing to get some home essentials, she realized that she could use the service to literally drop some knowledge on local students.

Passek does have to resort to some manual labor to get books to kids, though. She takes requests via a Google Form, then packs up the books and drops them off at Wing’s facility. Wing’s drones can carry payloads of up to three pounds, so paperbacks shouldn’t be an issue, but hefty tomes may not be an option. Eligible students in the Montgomery County public school system can request over 150,000 books from the library, and the airborne delivery is free of charge.

The Federal Aviation Administration has granted Wing an expanded Air Carrier Certificate. It has permission to “allow multiple pilots to oversee multiple unmanned aircraft making commercial deliveries simultaneously to the general public.” UPS also received FAA certification for commercial deliveries this month, but it will stick to hospitals and medical campuses for now.

Folks in Christiansburg can order goods from Walgreens or Sugar Magnolia through the Wing app, and a drone will drop off their order to a pre-determined location in their yard or driveway. They can also opt in to have FedEx Express deliveries made by drone. The trial follows other Wing pilot projects in Australia and Finland.

Flight Forward is the first company to claim the Part 135 Standard certification, and it’ll be able to operate an unlimited number of drones. The machines and their payloads can weigh more than 55 pounds and UPS can fly its drones at night.

Earlier this year, under the Transportation Department’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program, Flight Forward started transporting medical lab samples and blood for transfusions around WakeMed’s healthcare campus in Raleigh, North Carolina. After it received the FAA certification, it launched a Matternet M2 quadcopter flight under a “beyond visual line of sight” (BVLOS) exemption, which it says was “a first in the US for a regular revenue-generating delivery.”

At first, UPS plans to expand drone deliveries to hospitals and medical campuses across the US. It’s also planning to carry out flights outside of the healthcare industry, “including the transport of special commodities and other regulated goods.”

It aims to build a centralized operations center, run regular BVLOS flights and work with manufacturers to build drones that can carry various capacities of cargo. UPS also plans to quickly build out ground-based, detect-and-avoid technologies for safety and to expand its service in the future.

“This is history in the making, and we aren’t done yet,” UPS CEO David Abney said in a statement. “Our technology is opening doors for UPS and solving problems in unique ways for our customers. We will soon announce other steps to build out our infrastructure, expand services for healthcare customers and put drones to new uses in the future.”

Yates Electrospace Corporation (YEC), the company behind the Silent Arrow, envisions the drone as a potential replacement for the Joint Precision Airdrop System (JPADS) delivery method several armed forces, including the US military, use to deliver battlefield supplies. Even if you’re not familiar with the acronym, you’ve probably see JPADS in action in movies and newsreels. The system uses a combination of GPS and steerable parachutes to guide supplies that are dropped from an airplane to their intended destination. Compared to JPADS, YEC claims the main advantage of the Silent Arrow is that it can deliver up 1,631 pounds of supplies, the drone’s maximum load, at less than half the cost. Since it’s a glider, it’s also easier to steer to its target destination. When the situation calls for it, it can also be stealthy in a way that parachutes can’t.

While far removed from the consumer-facing delivery drones Amazon has been testing as a part of its Prime Air project, the Silent Arrow is a step forward for the field. With production slated to start this October, it’ll be among the first delivery drones to take to the skies.