Royal Mail has begun using drones to deliver post in Orkney, helping pave the way for drone deliveries to islands around the UK and on the mainland during emergencies.
The service between the village of Stromness on Orkney’s main island and the nearby islands of Hoy and Graemsay, using aircraft able to carry up to 6kg, is Royal Mail’s first permanent drone delivery service.
Using drones allows Royal Mail to provide a faster and more secure delivery service to islands such as Orkney, avoiding ferries or scheduled air services subject to weather cancellations, tides and timetables that do not suit the postal service.
Royal Mail has been testing and evaluating drone services on Scottish islands for some time, as has the NHS, which has trialled their use for flying urgent medical samples from the small Hebridean islands of Coll and Tiree.
Chris Paxton, the head of drone trials at Royal Mail, said these flights were far faster and more efficient, and helped cut carbon emissions.
However, due to air safety regulations, the drones can only be flown when operators can see the aircraft at all times. So operators are stationed at both Stromness and on the island for each flight.
On Hoy, famous for its sea stack the Old Man of Hoy, the drones are received by Fay and Albert Clark, crofters and minibus drivers there, who have served as part-time posties for decades helped by their son Adam.
The drone service, a joint project between Royal Mail, Skyports Drone Service, the islands’ port authority and the regional airline Logan Air, is expensive. It will last initially for three months, with its costs met by the Department of Transport.
Paxton said that in time similar services could operate in other archipelagos, such as the Farne islands off Northumberland, or within the Isles of Scilly. They could also be deployed in civil emergencies where floods have cut off rural communities.
In 2020, Royal Mail trialled a one-month long “air bridge” between Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly using a fixed-wing drone to fly essential mail, PPE and Covid testing kits. But current legislation requires the airspace to be closed to all other aircraft during such trials: an impractical obstacle for introducing regular postal services.
This is not the first experiment with inter-island postal services in Scotland. In the 1930s, a German rocketeer called Gerhard Zucker twice tried to use rockets packed with envelopes to take post between Harris and Scarp in the Outer Hebrides: both rockets exploded.
