Technology, Connected - Where Drone Delivery Actually Makes Sense

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

Drone delivery is not about filling the sky with quadcopters, Etienne Louvet argues. It is about rebuilding light-cargo logistics for places where vans, ferries, roads, and traditional delivery networks struggle: islands, remote communities, rural routes, hospitals, offshore platforms, and hard-to-reach homes. The conversation explains how Iona Drones is building fixed-wing VTOL aircraft for autonomous last-mile delivery, carrying parcels under 20 kg over long distances while navigating BVLOS flight rules, aviation regulation, weather, privacy, detect-and-avoid software, manufacturing, and the economics of making drone logistics cheaper than sending a vehicle for one parcel.Enjoy.--Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [e-mail]--TIMESTAMPS(00:00) Intro (01:50) How much weight can drones carry(02:29) What counts as light cargo (06:51) How drone regulations actually work (13:04) Self-assessment and risk management (14:12) Getting municipalities to say yes (16:38) Weather problems (19:48) Where Iona Drones is now (20:58) Maximizing payload capacity (21:58) Drone design choices (23:27) BVLOS (26:08) Drones and privacy (30:45) Drones in existing logistics (35:02) Where autonomous delivery is headed (39:30) Technology and human progress

You're not going to see drones everywhere. Even if everyone in your municipality was getting drone delivered every 10 minutes, the density wouldn't be that much. Where we operate, what people tell us is just like, well, you can deliver me with a pony if you want. Like, just deliver to me. Because that's what they need. I like to call that the way more moment is there is a global alignment in terms of aviation authorities.

When the US and Europe align on the way we should assess drone delivery and drones, you can be sure that like the rest will follow. So I assume your drones are all fitted with cameras and everything is recorded. Nope. No. Disruptors and curious minds. I'm Jeremy, thinking on paper from Atlanta, Georgia. This is Mark thinking on paper from the French Alps.

And we're getting into drones today. We're going to talk about drones. Where are we going, Mark? What's the story for today? As you said, the story of drones. And we start on the Scottish island of Iona. Perhaps one of the most tranquil, beautiful and idyllic places on the earth. But tranquil, idyllic, beautiful places have a logistics problem very often.

If you want something delivered, not so easy when you live isolated, removed from civilization, from parcel force, from Amazon, from UPS, from whoever delivers your mail, your parcels, your post. And today's guest runs a drone company called Iona Drones, and he is closing the gap, bridging the gap to those isolated remote, beautiful places where millions of people live that can't get their parcels delivered. And he's joined us today to explain the ins and outs of what might become instant autonomous delivery, logistics, the final mile. Welcome to the show, Etienne. Welcome to Thinking on Paper.

Thank you for thinking on paper with us. Thank you. Thank you very much for the invitation. In preparation for the show, I actually went and spoke to a logistics company in the French apps who deliver to remote places. And I told them about the show. I told them about you and I own a drones. And I said, imagine you're going to speak to Etienne.

What do you want to know? And he was very short and very quick and very businesslike in his response. And he said, after thinking for about three seconds, price, distance, weight. How much does it cost? How far can they fly and how much of my stuff can they carry? Yeah, so it's a good start and a good segue to what we address as a market. And we had to be a bit inventive and creative on that. What we address is what we consider to be the light cargo. And we define the light cargo by anything that is under 20 kilos or like 44 pounds about. And in general, like most of the parcels nowadays, they're less than one.

kilo less than two or three pounds. So it's up to 20 parcels. And usually I explain it this way. I say we're doing less than 20 parcels to 100 kilometers plus, so 60 miles plus in distance. And the reason why we do that is because we think that there is a gap in the market. The entire system that we have for logistics has been built on the traditional assumption that you need to keep the vehicles busy, which was working 100 years ago. But the problem is aggregations of volume.

It doesn't work in what we are expecting now. E-commerce, instant deliveries, reverse logistics, which is when you return a parcel somewhere. And you know like 30% of the e-commerce items, especially fashion, they're sent back. Some of them are actually burnt because it's not like it's too expensive to get them back to the warehouse. So we have a system that is stuck in the 20th century, and we are operating in the 21st. So we need to find a way to be more granular, to be more efficient on those.

And there is a famous saying, like if you have a ship with containers, the price per item and the efficiency per item is insanely high. The problem is for the light cargo. When you have less than 20 parcels, how do you justify to pay someone driving up your chalet in the French house? for like 20 minutes just to deliver one parcel. If the real cost was applied to this, you would pay 20 euros, $20, 30 pounds for parcel. And it doesn't work. I'm not a aerospace engineer by background.

I don't want to fly things around, even if it's a bit fun. But it's just that there is like the pragmatic approach. If you want to transport something in a middle of like London, Dublin, Los Angeles or anywhere like that, you have a density of population. So one shift can deliver 100 parcels. You don't need us in that case.

But whenever you need more granularity, whether it be for medical, emergency, reverse logistics, things like that, in that case you will need a different type of vehicle. And so what we say is not let's replace all the trucks and delivery vans on the road by drones. We say we need a fleet that is multi-model and that will have bikes, cargo bikes, trucks, 44 tons, space travel if you can, whatever else,

what makes sense for an item? And so to answer like the person that you talk to, less than 20 parcels, 100 kilometers plus, if you ask me to deliver one parcel, I can go very, very far. If you ask me to transport 20, it's going to be reduced. And in terms of cost, any autonomous systems has a marginal cost that tends towards the marginal cost of energy, which is here electricity. So plus capex, but the capex are marginal in the unit cost. So I can tell you that on average, you can fly 20 parcels to 100 kilometers for roughly 3 pounds, roughly like $3.5, basically.

which means that per parcel, yeah, you get under $1 per parcel. And that's 10 to 20x less than what exists at the moment when it works. Because think about all the times that something is not available because just it's not possible. Like they're not even going to bother offering that. Like you're not going to pay 30 pounds to or like $30 to get there. And so it's not going to be offered. It's quick. Okay.

Thank you. I'll tell him. I will pass on the information and see if he's interested. because some of that would be applicable for his business, not all of it, but some of it. So coordination is a big piece of this thing. Access is a big piece of this thing. The sky, the space in the sky requires coordination. And I know this happens differently in the United States than it does in Europe. Can you talk us through what it takes to convince whatever authority that you're dealing? Let's talk about Europe.

Whatever authority in Europe, you have to say, hey, I'm going to put a bunch of little planes in the sky, they're going to drop off packages everywhere. What do I need to do to get there? Do we include the UK in that description of Europe or do we not? Maybe the UK is different from France and the rest of Europe. Okay, I'll answer. I'm working with the three actually, so I can tell you. Brilliant. We have a top co in the US. I have a part of the team in Ireland and a part of the team in the UK. So I deal with the, the, the, the, Federal Aviation Authority, the UK Civilian Aviation Authority and the Irish Aviation Authority. I think I have a good perspective on which one I prefer and it's going to surprise a few, but

if there is one thing that Europe is good at, it's let's regulate. And so in a weird way, Europe is a better place for drones at the moment. Because in 2021, they created that framework, which is called the SORA framework. It stands for something like special assessment of. It's a risk assessment framework. It answers the question, if we authorize this thing to fly, whatever it is, what is the likelihood that it injures someone, that it damage a property, that it's on and so forth.

And Europe has been ahead because they implemented that framework in 2021, which is crucial for a business because you get certainty. We got the certainty on what is the logic behind. And when you have the logic, you can finally start a business, which answers a question that you haven't asked, which is why is it possible now? And we've heard about drone delivery for like 10 years now, more than 10 years.

I think Jeff Bezos talked about drone delivery in 2013. So what happened in between? There was a first move of curse. The technology was not there. And there was not like the regulatory framework to actually know what you need to build. So 2021, we got that. In Europe, after that, you have at a national level the possibility to implement or not. And the delays are not the same.

So the framework is the same for all countries. But of course, like in the Irish aviation authority, for instance, is notorious to be much faster in terms of. turnaround cycles. Most of the documents that you submit, they guarantee that you will get a reply in less than 30 days. In some places, it can be six months for the exact same document. Of course, the pace of iteration matters. And when I started to work on what should be the strategy, the geographical strategy for Iona, I'm a very pragmatic person. You will notice that I'm not in France. It's not because I don't like the country. It's because, unfortunately, it's not the best place to iterate.

best place to iterate in terms of cycles is Ireland. One of the best place in terms of R&D, also for the talent pool in the UK, it's the UK. And in terms of like commercial scale, I think that the US will be like definitely the biggest market. And as soon as like the US opens up really, it's going to go fast and it's going to, it's going to be very, very interesting. And that framework that I was talking about in Europe, the draft, which is the equivalent, basically, for the US, is called Part 108. It was in the pipes for a decade, basically.

They finally released the draft. They're supposed to implement the framework in 2006, which means that in 2006, the US will be able to catch up. And the UK decided to be a bit more creative. And they decided to take the European framework, but to create like a slightly different one because they're special. And so this is like a UK SORA. And so they use like the same system.

It's just like marginally you have like values that are changing. The most important for that, and it's probably on that that I can answer the rest of your question, how do we do that at scale? There are two routes. Either you fly, let's say you have like a drone, you're hobbyist and you want to fly something, or you have an industrial mission somewhere.

You want to like do something. Okay, in that case, it's going to be an operational authorization. You're going there. You're going to submit that like a flight plan to the aviation authority and that's it. The problem is if you need to submit a flight plan every time you deliver something, it's going to be slightly complex to scale. So what you need to achieve is in Europe, it's called the LUC. In the U.S. it's called the O.C.

it's the self-authorization capacity. And it's when the Aviation Authority goes to your office, checks your systems, and says, okay, the way you do it shows that under that circumstance, you're able to self-authorize an operation. At Iona, we operate in mostly rural environments, so we are considered to be at risk two or three. Okay, we can self-certify at risk two or three.

And in that case, what the aviation authority will tell us is, okay, under TEL2, which is the risk level two or three, with those criteria, you can self-authorize any operation. And this is when you get the scalability. Self-assessment. Obviously, it's in your best interest to do that with all the integrity and honesty that any business would. How are you measuring? that. How are you self-assessing if I've understood that correctly? You can't rely or it's difficult to rely on people to do that. The best way to do it is to encapsulate those workflows in something that is really tangible and will not change. We have a software. The autonomous layer in the drone doesn't take off if the regulatory criteria are not. not met. So we can demonstrate to the Aviation Authority that the layer one of our operating system is the regulatory framework. And this is the way you really do it at scale. And so you work on the

hardware and software and you explain the way it cannot operate any like any other way. And this is how you give confidence to the Aviation Authority that you're doing it the right way. Makes sense. So you have this overarching governance that's happening, this self-checks based on the where you're flying these, these drones, right? So what about municipalities and the areas that you're actually flying over? Do they have a say or do they, can they come up and be like, yeah, we're a no drone spot, guys, we're not doing this. I don't want my skies crowded. How does the municipality piece come in? That's an interesting question as well because many of the, and I'm going to, it's a sweeping generalization, but remote areas generally hold on to the more traditional way of life perhaps and are reluctant to embrace technology. I have to disagree on this one. Good. So part of my family is in the Alps.

Another part is in Brittany. Well, many people in my family are living in quite remote places. We tend to think that if they live very far away from Paris, London, Dublin, Los Angeles, and so on, it's because they have a certain way of life, which is true. They want a garden. They want like flowers. They want nature. They don't want to be excluded from society.

That's not part of the package. It's just they have to deal with it. And the way to think about it is don't like especially the more remote a place is, the more difficult it is for them to access anything and the less number of vehicles you need. So if you live in a small municipality somewhere, you're not going to see drones everywhere like in a dystopian world with like the sky full of drones and everything. Because literally even if everyone in your municipality was getting drone delivered every 10 minutes, the density wouldn't be that much. Where we operate, what people

tell us is just like, well, you can deliver me with a pony if you want, but like just deliver to me. Because that's what they need. I want to congratulate you and congratulate your bravery for choosing the west coast of Scotland to fly things. I'm from England. I understand the British weather. So the drone is flying across the North Sea to deliver a parcel. Maybe. Maybe. be 10 days a year, great, the sun is shining, there is no wind. You didn't choose an island in the Mediterranean where you have 250 days of sunshine and no wind. What's the failsafe? How windy and how rainy and how terrible can that British weather get before the drones don't fly? I'm coming from combat sports to make the training hard so that the fight is less difficult.

And I think Scotland is a good way. Island is not that bad also. Why we do it this way, because it makes sense. This is the places where we want to fly. This is like the kind of communities we want to serve. And weather vulnerability is not actually that big, like not that problem. I can explain the two variables in weather vulnerability. And the second one is the most important. The first one is you need to be able to go upwind.

How much trust do you have on your propellers? That's extremely easy to assess. and the aviation maps are quite accurate also. So we use regulatory approved buffers. If you operate in Galway, if you operate in places where the wind can be quite strong or the rain can be quite heavy, you will just adapt the hardware if needed.

But the IP rating for the rain is very simple to do because we're talking about a fuselage. So everything is inside a fuselage. Lash anyway and the capacity of the propellers to operate in a strong weather. It depends on how you configure the drone based on the use case. We have a complete modularity on that. But if you tell me that you really operate for offshore platforms in the North Sea, I might not get you the same configuration that what you will get if you operate in Cambridge.

How when they... Oh, at the moment we operated at more than 12 meters per second in Winston. speed, which is covering a good, I would say, like more than 80, 90% of the times in the UK. What we want to achieve, and this is something that for instance, Manna in Ireland has, is we can operate in more than 95% of the weathers. And more than 95% it means that, like, yes, if there is a storm, we're not going to go. Or we're not going to go. We will actually go because a delivery van or a road vehicle.

it would be too dangerous for them. So if you want emergency supply chain, you might want to send an unmanned drone instead of like a delivery van. But 95% is a good threshold. It has been proven we wouldn't be the first. That's not like the major risk. The second aspect of weather vulnerability

and in general, like how do we cope with weather is software. If you have ever flown a DGI drone, for instance, it's extremely stable to the point that like it's really impressive. That's just software. The more you train the system, the better it is at doing like a return to balance basically. So it's a non-linear PRD. And so like you can actually have a system that is capable of handling wind gust, handling like very complex weather, handling like last minute adjustments and everything. And it's super, super stable. How many deliveries have you guys completed today?

commercially zero because aviation authority. So it takes time. You guys are in waiting to get some of those approvals to kind of move forward with commercial delivery. We have the approvals. It's just that we don't have a need to use them at the moment. So we can operate deliveries in places. We have demonstrated that we can get the authorization. But at the moment, I don't have the production capacity to answer your

demand anyway if you're a logistics operator. So what we did and the priority for 2006 which was also like late 2025 is how do we scale our ops team? How do we scale the manufacturing capacity? We just won a project in Ireland for 3.8 million with air composites which is a supplier for Airbus and T.O. Dublin. We did demos with a number of customers. Some of them are going to be posted online very soon. So they can follow your audience, can follow us on LinkedIn and they will see that very soon. But before we get to real commercialization, we need most likely another round of funding.

And also we need to have a bit more in terms of headcount because we're basically at maximum bandwidth capacity at the moment. Got it. So a lot of the stuff like the contract that you just mentioned sounds like a great one, you'll develop a solution specifically for that aerospace supplier. from a logistics perspective. Explain what you're doing with those guys a little bit more. Air composites is a partner.

They are producing the airframes for us. So we have a very specific drone. Maybe that's worth mentioning for the people listening. When you think about drone, I can guarantee that you're not thinking about the one that we operate. We have 11, 12 feet in wingspan, three meter in wingspan, basically. It looks like a plane.

It takes our vertically. it has 95 liters in cargo bay capacity internally, which is like the size of a bathtub. So we're not talking about the same type of aircraft. And because of that... Sorry to interrupt you. Yeah, if you look on Instagram, I looked at some videos and shapes and pictures

and these look like small aircraft, small airplanes versus these little quad copter motor plastic things. Yeah, for sure. I like disruptive technologies, but to be honest, in terms of the shape of the aircraft, it's something that has been optimized quite a lot in the past century. So reinventing the wheel on some stuff is interesting.

And the tilt rotor that we have is very specific. We take off vertically. And then the propellers are switching to horizontal so that we get the efficiency of the wing and we become a plane, basically. That's very efficient because when we are wing-borne, we use very little electricity. So we can increase the performance.

And there is a reason for that around like energy efficiency in autonomous systems being like the main driver for cost. But yeah, we we optimize the light cargo drone. So one thing that we need to really like work on is the manufacturing because we have this very specific airframe and because we need to do it aviation grade. So it's not something that you can like just build or assemble just like that. One of the things that I've noticed in reading about drones is this idea of like getting the ability to operate outside of the visual line of sight of these things. And I'm assuming you're with these airplanes and the distances you're covering, that's the realm in which you're pursuing, correct? Yes, I was pairing you with the BV loss jargon, but let's get into it. BV loss stands for beyond vision line of sight.

It's not a certification. It's a way to operate. If there are a few people that are aviation enthusiast in the audience, they might know the IFR, which is the way you operate a plane without visibility. That's pretty much the same. I have to interject just to make my late grandfather proud of me. He wanted me to go to Embry-Riddle University aeronautical and learn how to fly planes and all that stuff.

So IFR and VFR, IFR instrument flight rules, VFR visual flight rules, right? So if the weather gets bad, you have to rely on instruments. You have to have IFR certification. That's kind of what you're talking about, right? Exactly. And that applies to BVLOS. So vision line of sight, when you can see a drone, it's VLOS. Beyond vision line of sight, it's when you can't see the drone.

And so it has to be automated or autonomous, depending on the level that we apply. That capacity, we have it. We demonstrated it. We don't need to use it at the moment. because we don't have a use case that requires it. In order to fly beyond Vision 9 of sight, you need to fly the drone at more than a kilometer of distance. What we do at the moment is still like operating the drone,

working on the manufacturing at scale, training data and everything. So most of the time, what we do is that we have multiple training facilities and we just like do circles around because we don't need it. But if we wanted to, we can do it. And what you need to demonstrate in that case is that you are compliant with the rules. If you want to operate at scale with those rules, you will need to demonstrate that like you can do it again encapsulated complexity in a software or something like that because otherwise it's going to be a bit more difficult to do like repeatable operations and so on. In the past few years, you had a lot of companies, especially in the US because they know how to sell, that were saying like, yeah, we're bevile. Doesn't mean much, to be honest.

You can be BV loss with a DGI drone. And yet, especially with the new rules, you will not be able to fly a DGI drone for drone delivery in the US. Like that's a guarantee. It's a great marketing stunt, but I think we need like the industry needs to go back to a bit of like, okay, let's do the work. The way you do it short term is not the way you do it long term.

And the real thing is like, how do you get repeatable operations? BVLOS is the way you fly. Mark, that sounds like the Chattelier principle from our book club. I was thinking exactly the same thing, the shorts. And with an industry like this as well, the short term and the long term are so disconnected about what you can do in the immediate future

and what will be possible in five or 10 years. Etienne, I think speaking from personal opinion and experience, People have two fears about drones. I think one is the skies being full of drones everywhere and you're not being able to move. Okay, I think we've put that one to bed for this. I think the other is data and privacy. So I assume your drones are all fitted with cameras

and everything is recorded. Nope. No, okay. No, not at all. We don't want to rely on cameras, not because I don't want pictures. of you in your garden sunbassing, but just because

we don't want to be dependent on that. Anything that is flight dependent has like if you're dependent on a camera, you're actually dependent on something that doesn't work a lot of, like very often in the day. Your drones don't have any cameras.

No. And we can fit one. But if we can avoid fitting one, we stay like as simple as possible. If you want to fit a camera, it can be like it can have a few use cases. So like for instance, if you want to operate, this is very often for like the suburban delivery companies. You can think of flight tracks, Google Wing, Mana.

They use a camera because it's a way to risk mitigate. The aviation authority will tell them, yes, we know that you have a GPS RTK, which is extremely precise. But we want redundancy. We want you to make sure that when you lower the cargo, because most of them are using like a thread or a winch, you know exactly where it goes. And that way we can be 100% sure that like where we deliver is exactly where it has to be delivered.

And in other use cases, you don't need that. You're going to upset a few people, you know, who are going to be waving at the drone when their parcel comes. You're like, here I am, here I am. And that's the way to upsell. Like we're adding like an option, a bonoom. like we can get you a family picture if you stand here in the garden

at exactly that right the right time. I think it could be a really interesting differentiator for you guys saying that we don't want drones that don't want your data. We're just trying to get GPS information, probably altitude, wind speed, all the

things that you're looking for from an aerodynamics perspective and efficiency flight path. That's what you're working on. That's what you're taking in. That's what's training when you talk about these training missions and the models that you're feeding, those are the inputs, right? Yeah, in the age of AI, everyone is talking about proprietary data, which is a real thing. We are using a lot of AI, sometimes using the previous name with reinforcement learning and

stuff like that. But we have a number of things that are extremely valuable on proprietary data, the way we do like the automation on some paperwork for the aviation authority, the way we are optimizing physics models in 4D, so like 3D with time, so that we are managing the complexity of like DAA, so detect and avoid. Like we can have a fleet of drones operating in the same airspace and so on and so forth. We have a lot of software, we have a lot of data. We're not interested in like non-ironautical, non-robotics data. That's way too much to handle So the reality is 99% of the time. You want something that is really efficient at one job,

not that it's like trying to be a jack of all trades because you're not going to be competitive. So we don't use your data. We don't collect actually your data. Okay, so real quick, everybody, just in case you had to pop out and go get a drink or something, two things. One, drones are going to cover the sky and block the sunshine.

There's plenty of space up there for everybody. and these guys aren't going to take your data or videos of you, sunbathing. So let's move back, Mark, if we can, to your, the thing you started with, you talked to this logistical company today. They asked these three questions very poignantly. Let's say, ATN, for a bit of a thought experiment, we get Mark's buddy and you guys hooked up. He's like, yeah, I want to start with one drone. I want to look at this geography. Imagine you have the funding.

imagine everything's in place to deliver this solution. What does it look like? Let's unpack it. Okay. So either you're a professional logistics operator, in that case, you have a system that you use, EMS transport management system, or you might be an hospital. You might be like a single player somewhere that needs like a type of delivery, offshore platform, for instance, is a good example.

In that case, you won't have anything and will get you a portal. The portal is going to show you like the geography and we're going to assess flight routes with you. So we're going to show you like what you can do and you're going to click on the point of delivery and we're going to show you how it works. And then we're going to assign, you're not going to buy it because you can't really like buy our drone,

but we're going to assign a drone to your warehouse, to your depot, to your location. And then from there, we're going to show you how it works. It's quite simple, to be honest. We're even going to get you like small tools like the maintenance app. It's going to be able to like you're going to scan a QR code and it's going to tell you you have to change the battery or you have like to do things like that. And we'll make it like as simple as possible so that you don't need any expertise. And then once it's ready, so once like there is an implementation time of probably like two or three months minimum,

you get depending on where you operate also like which country and everything, just to get the authorization like the authorization to so that it works, to train potentially the people that you have locally on how to use the technology and everything, let's say maximum six months. And then you're going to be good to go. And when it's completely mature and at scale, it's just a matter of like, okay, I have this parcel, I have this thing that I want to deliver. Either it's an automated route that you do like every day or every now and then. And in that case, you don't need anything. It's just programmed. And you put the cargo in the drone and it goes. When the drone lands in the other, like at the delivery point, for instance,

you don't need anyone because the drone has actually a cargo bay that is opening from the bottom. So it opens the cargo bay. It drops the parcel and then it flies away. And it's going to be able to do that back and force constantly. And then if you want an additional drone or if you want an operation that is even more autonomous. We have a system that will automatically load and

unload the drone because the vision is that once you have like this back in force, let's say you go to village number one or depot number one, you can actually like drop a few parcels load new ones, go to depot number two, village number two, drop a few parcels, load new ones. And then you switch to what is the vision for us,

which is autonomous robotics networks. We're doing drones. Yes. We're doing drones because it's a very efficient way to deliver that. But as I said at the beginning, I'm not an aerospace engineer. I'm working with Manina, but I'm not trying to fly things around

if it doesn't make sense. Our system, and especially our software system and a lot of the IP that we created, is agnostic. We can use exactly the same for autonomous ground robots with wheels that will do like one kilometer on a sidewalk. That works exactly the same. And we think that we're building the operating system to move things around.

So drones are a great use case and a starting point because it's very complex. It creates a lot of value and defensibility. And then it becomes like very efficient for us to add new systems to it like ground robots. And in that case, you do village number one, village number two with a drone. And then village number two, either you do like a drone delivery directly in the backyard of Sarmand if they want to, or you can switch to another type of vehicle if it makes more sense, like a grand robot. This is total logistics reimagination. I think it's pretty cool.

Have you considered taking a leaf out of Zipline's book and going, because they went to Garner to transport blood around to go into another country, which it has less administration and trialing your fleet there? No, well, I considered, of course, like moving and which country should be the best. The reality is, zip line, for instance, is operating the P1. There, the platform one, which is what we call the fixed wing. So it doesn't take off vertically and everything. It's like a polystyrene wing on a very light cargo and it drops a parachute with like a few vaccines, blood samples or whatever.

It doesn't take off on its own. It's a slingshot and it doesn't lend as well. It gets caught by a wire, basically. The reason for that is takeoff and lending takes a lot of electricity, so they wanted to maximize the range. It's a very efficient product market fit. If you want to do like what they have to do, which is blood samples and vaccines and drugs in very far away places in Africa,

the reality is it's completely different from what you have to do to operate in Europe, or in the US. And this is why they developed the P2, because the P1 wouldn't be authorized to fly in Europe or the US. So to answer your question, I don't want to go there because it's a different business. It doesn't add any value to my stack. It's not data on which I can actually build up.

And I'm not training what is hard, which is how do we do repeatable operation under that level of risk that is required with the aviation authority. I think the Waymo moment that I like to call that, the way more moment is there is a global alignment in terms of aviation authorities. When the US and Europe align on the way we should assess drone delivery and drones,

you can be sure that like the rest will follow. And so if we comply with that, if we train under that environment, we are actually scalable, we are actually a proper business. everything else is a marketing stunt. I wonder that. Well, I think it's really cool the way you set the stage with this is it's a bigger picture

than just, hey, you're not just a drone company. You're a coordination and logistics company based on a software stack that has drones as a part of it, has potentially robots as a future piece of that puzzle. I love what I heard today. I thought it was really cool. I've watched a lot of drone videos. They're freaking cool. There'll be a lot of people watching this and listening this because they love

drones. So just a couple of quick fire questions on the drone. How fast can it go? 126 km per hour. How high can they go? Pretty as long as you have oxygen density in a sufficient quantity quite high, but we don't operate like the evolution for drones is around between 120 and 800 meter in altitude. We can go higher, but after that like not very efficient. You don't want to go super high if you don't need to. And last one, I know my logistics friend will rent the drones. If you wanted to buy one, how much would they cost? I'm not going to be a politician trying to avoid the question.

I'm going to answer that question. But the thing is, in aviation, maintenance is the primary cost. So you replace the components every time. Like, for instance, my motors need to be replaced or checks every 4,000 hours and everything. So it wouldn't give you like an very accurate figure. If I tell you that at scale, a drone at the moment is more expensive than this, but like at scale, we expect the drones to cost between 20 and 30k about. The thing is, if you fly, you need to replace the batteries,

you need to replace the propellers, you need to replace and everything. So it's not like if you could just like sell the drone. It doesn't really work this way. Awesome. Thank you. Let's land the drone, Jeremy. All right. So question from Kevin Kelly that we ask every one of our guests. and feel free to riff on this in any form or fashion.

This is not a test. This is just a riff. So Kevin Kelly's question to you is, what do we want humans to be? And how does technology help us get there if it does? I will connect with something that I really like at the moment, and it's the concept of level of abstractions. There is a double connection, and I'll try to make it clear, promise.

When you look at the professional work or when you look at technology, what we always try to do is climb up the levels of abstractions. When you're in a professional setting, it's going to be managing the executions of others. You're going to have three ways of creating more value. Either you are taking a step back and you manage. you're taking a step back abstractions again and you're creative so you look at something from a different angle perspective

or you have a deep knowledge and expertise in something so again you take a step back and you look at the way people could do something and like differently and like pushing the boundaries and the frontier of what is possible I think that same principle

applies to what we do in tech. It started with analog. We were like literally, I was not born, but you were literally like taking a wire and connecting someone to the phone of someone else and everything. And then we encapsulated complexity. So we took a step back and we created the routing systems and everything and more and more. What we ended up doing a few decades ago, basically, it's like more and more coding. So it's the way we interface with the machine. It was not analog anymore. It was like me and or you talking to the machine. And what AI is doing at the moment is the new way of abstraction.

So instead of coding, I can speak in plain English and I can therefore add nuances that are not possible with coding and I can encapsulate more complexity to get to a result. If you apply that to Sostaitina, why Jeff Bezos and others are looking at the moon, why they're looking at space? because they kind of finished the game. So they're looking at the DLCs now.

And it makes sense. And it's probably needed also because they got so far that they can take a giant leap in the abstraction level. And they can say like, okay, but business, whatever and I think, we don't care. What humankind should do? And should we do, should we stay on Earth? Should we do that?

Should we do anything? So I think that, to answer the question more precisely, I think that it's a bit like the journey that matters. And I think that humans are trying to find a meaning, and that's my favorite book, actually, Victor Frankel, Man's Search for Meaning. They're trying to find a meaning, and they're trying to learn,

and it's mostly driven by curiosity. Great answer. That was fantastic. ATN, CEO of I own. drones joining us today for a wonderful conversation. We'll post a whole bunch of links in information. And we maybe do a reaction video to your next launch. Let us know when it is and we will do that.

Thank you so much for thinking on paper with us today. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for thinking on paper with this. You can find all about Iona drones at IonaDrones. IonaDrones.com thinking on paper at thinking on paper. .x, Y, Z.

We have a NASA space rocket scientist. on next week. If this conversation has got you thinking, wondering, dreaming, like, share, subscribe and come and join us thinking on paper. And until next time, be disruptive. Stay curious. Keep thinking on paper.