Since August, anyone who has mastered the strenuous climb to the Great Wall near Badaling - the famous pilgrimage site in the north-east of Beijing - can reward themselves at the top with fast food or drinks. The refreshments are delivered by drone.
Four to five aircraft are in use there, says Pu Siwu, an employee of the service provider Meituan, which operates the delivery drones. The drones make 20 deliveries per hour from the valley. On the way back, they pick up rubbish. Orders are placed via mobile phone app. But that's not all: "This flight route is also used to transport emergency medicine," says Pu. In three to five minutes, aid can arrive if a Wall tourist has blood sugar problems, for example.
Beijing promotes "low altitude economy"
"Drones are now very common," explains aviation expert Shen Yingchun from the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. They are already widely used in agriculture or for monitoring power grids. Delivery services are just getting started.
Beijing is massively promoting the so-called low-altitude economy, i.e. the economy in airspace up to 1,000 metres. Drones are one of the "new qualitative productive forces" with which the Communist Party hopes to secure progress and growth in the future. The industry harbours high costs and risks, which is why it cannot develop without state aid, according to experts.
According to official figures, the sector was worth an estimated 500 billion yuan in 2023 (currently around 66.3 billion euros). By 2030, the sector could be worth around two trillion yuan. As of July, the Civil Aviation Administration counted almost 608,000 registered drones in China, 48 percent more than at the end of 2023. According to the authorities, there were more than 14,000 licensed companies in the unmanned aerial vehicle sector.
Coffee and snacks from the air
In the southern Chinese metropolis of Shenzhen, Meituan uses drones to deliver coffee and other snacks. Over a dozen test stations have been set up in public areas such as parks.
This is how it works: an employee collects the order placed via the app from the restaurant or café and takes it to a drone launch platform, which are usually stationed on the roofs of shopping centres. There, the delivery is packed into a box and attached to a drone, which flies along a fixed route to a pick-up station. The drone sets the delivery down on the roof of the centre. The customer can then collect their order from a securely locked compartment by scanning a QR code. The drones currently only fly during the day. If it is windy or raining, they stay on the ground.
In Shenzhen's Guangdong province, where the megacity of Guangzhou is located and borders Hong Kong, unmanned air taxis are set to take passengers to their destination in just a few minutes, thus avoiding the congested roads. However, at the equivalent of over 1,000 euros per flight, this is hardly suitable for the masses.
Germany flies behind
In Germany, much of what is already being used in China is still a dream of the future. At the end of February, however, a fully automated scheduled drone flight operation was launched as a delivery service for companies in Lüdenscheid, North Rhine-Westphalia. According to the project partners, this was the first commercial scheduled flight operation in Germany using a specially developed transport drone.
According to the Federal Aviation Office, there are currently four holders of licences for transport drones in Germany. "We cannot provide any information on whether the operators actually use the authorisation in regular operations," explains the authority in Braunschweig / dpa