Alphabet's Wing ended drone deliveries in Canberra, its first market, after five years

Wing, a subsidiary of Alphabet, runs commercial drone delivery of food, coffee and pharmacy items direct to people's homes.

Wing began delivering household items to select ACT suburbs with a warehouse in Mitchell where merchants co-located stock; after a contested 2018 trial in Bonython, it expanded to Gungahlin in 2019 with approval from Australia's aviation authority CASA, estimating up to $40M in benefits for ACT businesses.

Community resistance ran from the start: in November 2018, 1,043 petitioners asked the ACT Legislative Assembly to abandon the trial, citing privacy, noise, pets and wildlife; ravens disrupted deliveries for months in spring 2021. Meanwhile the operating model moved to shopping-centre sites in Logan and Ipswich and a Coles partnership on the northern Gold Coast.

It is a rare public admission that a flagship market no longer fits the business — the exit is a side effect of a model change, not a failure of demand.

The shopping-centre pivot trades control (own warehouses) for leverage (retailers' foot traffic and merchant relationships, like the Coles deal).

Community resistance documented since 2018 — petitions, noise complaints, academic scrutiny — never stopped Wing until the model itself moved on.

The company kept engineering staff in Canberra for non-consumer pilots, showing the city remains a lab even after it stopped being a market.

Your first market is an experiment, not a business: when the operating model changes, be willing to retire the city that no longer fits it.

As of September 2023, Wing continued operating in Queensland — Coles deliveries on the northern Gold Coast, two Logan sites and Ipswich — while maintaining a reduced ACT presence for non-consumer delivery trials; Suskin said Canberra 'is on our radar'.