A Flytrex delivery drone over Granbury, southwest of Fort Worth. [Photo: Flytrex]

Robots are staking out territory across North Texas—from driverless 18-wheelers on I-45 to robotaxis rolling into Dallas to sidewalk delivery robots to a wide array of drone delivery services. Now Flytrex—an Israel-based restaurant drone delivery company that’s been buzzing North Texas skies since early 2022—is about to boost its operations here in a big way.

Flytrex recently became one of just four drone delivery companies to receive FAA approval for Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations in the U.S. (The others are Wing, Zipline, and Amazon. The first two already make drone deliveries in Dallas-Fort Worth, and Amazon is planning to.) 

That FAA approval enables Flytrex to expand its service nationwide to the 37 largest metro areas in the U.S., “unlocking the ability to bring drone delivery to over 100 million people,” the company announced today.

Flytrex is partnering with DoorDash for food drone deliveries in parts of Frisco and Little Elm. [Photo: Business Wire]

The company’s services to date in North Texas have included a partnership with Brinker International to deliver chicken wings by drone in Granbury, southwest of Fort Worth; partnering with Jersey Mike’s and Subs, Little Caesars Pizza, Papa Johns, Raising Cane’s, and “several other” restaurant brands for drone deliveries in Little Elm, west of Frisco; and, earlier this summer, partnering with DoorDash to fly food from “dozens” of local and national restaurants in Frisco and Little Elm, with region-leading 8:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. operating hours and “industry-leading payload capacity” in its delivery drones.

Drone flights monitored from operations center

Before getting the new approval, Flytrex had to observe FAA regulations that required visual observers on the ground tracking each drone throughout its flight. Now, with the BVLOS approval, Flytrex can monitor multiple drones remotely from a single operations center, “increasing delivery throughput while dramatically reducing operational costs.”

“After nearly a decade of development, this BVLOS approval transforms our entire business model,” Flytrex Co-Founder and CEO Yariv Bash said in a statement. “We can now outperform any other traditional on-demand delivery method—monitoring fleets of drones from centralized command centers rather than posting observers across delivery zones. With BVLOS, we can now build the infrastructure to bring drone delivery to 100 million Americans.”

Bash was the co-founder and team leader of SpaceIL, a Tel Aviv nonprofit that in 2019 helped lead Israel’s first mission to the moon. The Beresheet (Genesis) robotic moon lander made it to the moon but crashed on its surface, missing out on the $20 million Google Lunar XPRIZE. 

With its new FAA approval, Flytrex said it plans to “vastly expand” its operations in Dallas-Fort Worth, with plans to add “dozens of new sites” in the region by the end of 2025. The company aims to “cover the entire metro area” in the next 12 months as part of its plans to scale nationwide.

To date, Flytrex says it has completed over 200,000 deliveries across Texas and North Carolina, “transforming last-mile logistics for suburban communities with affordable, scalable access to aerial delivery.”

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