DoorDash is preparing to fly its own delivery drones commercially this fall, after securing Part 135 air carrier certification from the Federal Aviation Administration for a new in-house program called DoorDash Air. The company is the eighth U.S. operator to win the certification, which the FAA grants only after a five-phase review of an operator's aircraft, maintenance program and safety procedures.
Unlike DoorDash's existing drone partnerships, DoorDash Air runs on an aircraft the company designed itself through DoorDash Labs, the in-house robotics unit that also built Dot, its sidewalk delivery robot already operating in parts of Arizona and California. Co-founder Stanley Tang framed the project around logistics rather than novelty, saying, according to The Next Web:
We didn't start with the question, what's the coolest autonomous tech we could make.
Stanley Tang, DoorDash co-founder
The target is the delivery range DoorDash struggles with most: orders between three and five miles, which made up more than a fifth of its 2025 volume and took nearly 25% longer to fulfill than shorter trips, largely because finding an available human Dasher for a midrange run takes longer. During 2025 pilot runs, drone deliveries within that range averaged under 25 minutes, and some pilot markets saw sustained order-volume increases of roughly 30% over nine weeks, according to Fox News.
Limits on autonomy, for now
The certification comes with a significant limitation: DoorDash still lacks approval to fly drones beyond an operator's visual line of sight, which restricts initial operations to short, supervised flights rather than the fully autonomous networks the industry has promised for years. DoorDash has said it will share aircraft specifications, including range and payload capacity, this fall but has not named its first launch cities.
The company is not dropping its existing drone partnerships with Alphabet's Wing and Israeli firm Flytrex, which have completed tens of thousands of deliveries together and recently expanded into the Atlanta and Charlotte metro areas. DoorDash Air head Harrison Shih has said the goal is to build "the full stack" of drone infrastructure in-house rather than depend entirely on outside vendors.
DoorDash joins a crowded field of delivery companies betting on drones to cut costs on mid-distance orders, including Amazon's long-delayed Prime Air, Walmart's drone pilots, and startups Zipline and Manna, the latter building a U.S. factory to compete directly with Wing. Persistent constraints around battery life, weather and airspace rules have kept the category a small fraction of overall delivery volume industry-wide, and DoorDash has been careful to characterize drones as a complement to human Dashers rather than a replacement.
