Remote pilot in command starts guiding Dallas drone deliveries

A remote pilot in command, or RPIC, supervises a fleet of drones rather than flying one. Wischnewsky works from Flytrex’s operations center and watches hexacopter drones (six-rotor aircraft) carry orders to homes and businesses up to three miles away. He checks data from GPS, lasers and other sensors as each flight goes out.

His routine is a three-part check. He confirms a drone is ready to fly, that its route is clear and that the weather is safe. After that, the automation takes over and he becomes, in his own words, a safety net. At his busiest he has as many as 10 drones under his watch at the same moment.

Weather is the most common problem. He remembers one drone that had been airborne for only seconds when the wind picked up so fast that he had to step in and bring it back. The cargo was an ice cream cake, and it survived.

The Dallas-Fort Worth area is a test bed for something called UTM, short for unmanned aircraft systems traffic management. Think of it as a shared map that drones from different companies feed in real time. Each aircraft reports its position, so others can steer clear, even when no human can see it.

That matters because Flytrex is not alone up there. Wing (owned by Google’s parent Alphabet), Zipline and Amazon all run delivery drones in the same region. Wischnewsky coordinates with that growing crowd as part of the job.

For him, the hardest adjustment was mental. Pilots of regular aircraft are taught not to trust automation. Supervising drones means doing the opposite most of the time, while staying alert for the moment the system needs a human.

You need aviation credentials before you start. Flytrex requires an FAA drone pilot certificate (the license the Federal Aviation Administration issues to commercial drone operators) and a weeks-long FAA-approved training course, so every RPIC can take control of a drone if something goes wrong.

Wischnewsky came in with a head start. When he applied, he was already a certified drone pilot and was training to become a commercial pilot and flight instructor. He says he wanted the job as soon as he heard drones were bringing food around his Texas neighborhood.

Beyond the paperwork, the role rewards calm. You are supervising machines that mostly fly themselves, but when wind or an obstacle turns up, you have seconds to react. Teamwork matters too, since your traffic shares the sky with competitors’ fleets.

For customers, the human in the loop is part of why drone delivery is allowed to grow. Every drone that can be safely handed to the automation frees a supervisor to watch more of them, which is what keeps delivery fees down.

Flytrex has pushed that further since this job profile was written. In September it announced rooftop docks at restaurants in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where a drone lands, shuts off its motors and waits. When the food is ready, staff clip the bag to the drone’s hook and it leaves within seconds. A machine-learning system predicts which restaurants will get orders at a given time and sends idle drones there in advance.

Flytrex says this cuts its cost per delivery by 60% and halves delivery times, with more than 100 more sites being installed. Those are the company’s own figures. It also says it has completed more than 250,000 US deliveries and works with Uber Eats and DoorDash, and it now builds about 1,000 drones a year at a factory in Pilot Point, Texas.

Today, flying drones beyond a pilot’s line of sight needs special FAA approval, which Flytrex has. The FAA is working on a broader rule, known as Part 108, that would make these flights routine. The final version went to the White House’s regulatory review office in July, and as of early October the FAA was still described as working on it.

Part 108 would also move responsibility from individual pilots to the companies that run the drones. Operators would have to keep training records for staff and prove that whoever oversees a flight is current on that aircraft. That is exactly the kind of oversight an RPIC provides today.

In early October the FAA also awarded $12 million across 19 research projects, including work on linking drone traffic systems with regular air traffic control at airports. If the rule lands and that link works, jobs like Wischnewsky’s could move from a Texas test bed to many more cities.