Written by Zipline Team
Published on November 6, 2025

Safety Facts

Zipline is obsessed with safety

Zipline is an American robotics company that designs, manufactures, and operates the world’s largest autonomous delivery system. Zipline operates with the approval of the FAA and has secured the most comprehensive approvals for drone delivery in the United States.

Since our first commercial delivery in 2016, Zipline has:

• Flown more than 135 million commercial autonomous miles since we started, the same as driving on every road in America more than 32 times, without injury. According to NHTSA data, every 135 million miles of driving on U.S. roads in 2024 on average resulted in more than 600 crashes, about 100 injuries, and at least one fatality.
• Made more than 2.5 million deliveries. Zipline now makes an autonomous delivery somewhere in the world every 20 seconds.
• Been building one of the largest fleets of aircraft in the world, commercially deploying hundreds of aircraft designed, built, and tested in the United States.
• Conducted one of the largest aviation test campaigns in industry history in all types of weather conditions, from Texas summers to Wyoming winters.

Safety at Every Step:

• Redundant Systems: Zipline’s aircraft include many redundant flight critical systems and are designed to minimize human interactions by keeping the aircraft far away from humans and physical obstacles.
• Testing Program: Zipline has conducted hundreds of thousands of flights at our test sites, part of what made our process one of the largest flight testing programs ever. Zipline engineers have collectively spent more than a million hours testing and improving the safety of our system, including hardware, software and operations.
• Manufacturing Testing: Before entering service, every aircraft goes through a rigorous suite of end-of-the-line checks and automated tests to check the integrity of its components.
• Safely Integrating into the Airspace: All of Zipline’s U.S. operations and aircraft are certificated and approved, and under the rigorous oversight of the Federal Aviation Administration. Zipline was one of the first FAA-certificated Part 135 commercial drone delivery operators in the U.S., and received the FAA’s first-ever approval of airspace traffic management system for drone delivery.

Before Each Delivery:

• Before launch, aircraft automatically reserve their own strategic flight route in our FAA-approved traffic management system to avoid conflicts.
• Trained Zipline personnel monitor flights from a remote operations center.
• Each aircraft runs more than 500 pre-flight safety checks to ensure system reliability before launching, and then performs 500 safety checks every second while in flight.
• Each aircraft has a Detect-and-Avoid system onboard to avoid other aircraft.
• The onboard flight computers can detect and automatically respond to issues.

In-flight Detection System:

• Zips perform more than 500 safety checks a second and are able to adjust their positioning every 20 milliseconds, five times faster than the blink of an eye.
• If a mid-flight safety check finds a challenge or issue, the Zip’s FlightIQ system helps it determine the safest course of action, such as returning to the dock or flagging a repair for maintenance.
• If the aircraft can’t resolve its issue or needs to exit the airspace for any reason, the aircraft will deploy its parachute so that the aircraft can float down to the ground. As an added safety measure, the aircraft emits an audible alert to notify anyone in the vicinity.
• If a parachute landing occurs, one of our team members tracking flights will be dispatched to retrieve the aircraft immediately in close coordination with local officials and the community.