Southwest China's Chengdu City is racing to expand its low-altitude economic sector, as the city has seen an extensive use of drones in various scenarios such as aerial delivery, river monitoring, firefighting, urban management and industrial production.
In a mountainous resort in the county-level city of Pengzhou, tourists were enjoying the convenience brought by drone deliveries.
In the past, tourists had to drive nearly one hour to downtown areas for shopping or eating delicacies unavailable in the resort. But now, a drone delivery can meet their demands in just 10 minutes.
"I suddenly wanted to taste hotpot food today. So, I ordered a drone delivery service with a restaurant. I didn't expect the takeout would be sent to me in about 10 minutes," said a tourist.
As of now, Pengzhou City had opened 42 routes for drones, with up to 100 flights being conducted per day and over 2,000 orders having been placed for drone deliveries of food.
The thriving low-altitude economy in Chengdu is attributed to the establishment of the "Sky's Eye" -- a national-level civil unmanned aviation test base, which boasts a total of eight test sites and 14 major test scenarios and can accommodate the takeoff and landing of hundreds of unmanned aerial vehicles simultaneously.
"We conduct 10 to 20 flights from 09:00 to 18:00 every day, basically covering the whole opening time of the airspace," said Zheng Wenqiang, test flight director of a drone company.
Chengdu has now gathered over 110 upstream and downstream enterprises in the drone industrial chain. It strives to bring the size of its low-altitude manufacturing sector to more than 6.5 billion yuan (about 897 million U.S. dollars) and that of the whole low-altitude economic sector to over 26 billion yuan (about 3.59 billion U.S. dollars) at the end of this year.
The size of China's low-altitude economy exceeded 500 billion yuan (about 69 billion U.S. dollars) in 2023, up by 33.8 percent year on year, according to the CCID consulting, a think tank under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
As of February this year, there are more than 57,000 enterprises in China's low-altitude economic sector.
Chengdu strives to expand low-altitude economic sector
