DoorDash announces FAA part 135 air carrier certification for in-house drone delivery program DoorDash Air

DoorDash Air

DoorDash has received FAA Part 135 air carrier certification, making it the eighth company legally authorized to conduct commercial drone deliveries in the US. The program, called DoorDash Air, was built by DoorDash Labs, the same team behind the DoorDash Dot sidewalk robots.

Stanley Tang, DoorDash's co-founder and chief product officer, frames the launch less as a drone story than a systems story. Getting an aircraft to fly is, in his words, the easy part. The harder work is building everything around it: merchant pickup infrastructure that handles drive-throughs, strip malls, and rooftops differently; a smart scale device distributed to merchants to determine whether an order is within weight limits for drone eligibility; drop-zone perception systems that don't rely on raw GPS coordinates; and drone deconfliction logic to manage airspace conflicts without the ADS-B transponder system used by manned aircraft.

“Tang: 'We officially got our FAA Part 135 certification — it's our air carrier certification, the same certification that all corporate jet charters require. We're the eighth company to get the Part 135 for drone delivery. Drones do really well in suburbs — great for deliveries where things are further out, where perhaps there's not a straight line you can get to, or maybe more rural areas where it's less desirable for human dashers.'”

Where drones win

Tang sees suburbs as the natural early market, for roughly the same reason DoorDash originally built its business there rather than dense urban cores. Single-family homes offer clean drop zones, orders tend to fall in the three-to-six mile range where drones outpace cars stuck at stoplights, and lower dasher density in suburban and semi-rural areas makes autonomous delivery more economically attractive. Getting a coffee delivered in under 15 minutes on an order that previously took 45 is Tang's lead use case.

High-rises, complicated grocery orders, and anything requiring a human to navigate steps stay with human dashers for now.

Multimodal platform

Tang's broader argument is that no two of DoorDash's roughly 3 billion annual deliveries look alike, and the goal is a routing system that assigns each order to the right mode: drone, Dot robot, or human. That multimodal framing is the commercial thesis behind both DoorDash Air and Dot, and it also explains why the Part 135 certification matters beyond the regulatory milestone. Without it, DoorDash couldn't plug drone capacity into its live marketplace at commercial scale.

Tang attributes the timing to three things converging: AI models capable of powering the perception and autonomy stack, hardware investment accelerating drone components and chips like the Nvidia Thor, and roughly eight years of operational learning on what end-to-end delivery infrastructure actually requires.